US Supreme Court sides with Trump in South Sudan deportation fight
The court on June 23 put on hold Boston-based U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy's April 18 injunction requiring migrants set for removal to so-called "third countries" where they have no ties to get a chance to tell officials they are at risk of torture there, while a legal challenge plays out.
The court on Thursday granted a Justice Department request to clarify that its June 23 decision also extended to Murphy's separate May 21 ruling that the administration had violated his injunction in attempting to send a group of migrants to South Sudan. The U.S. State Department has urged Americans to avoid the African nation "due to crime, kidnapping and armed conflict."
The court said that Murphy should now "cease enforcing the April 18 injunction through the May 21 remedial order."
Two liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissented from the decision, criticizing the court's actions.
"Today's order clarifies only one thing: Other litigants must follow the rules, but the administration has the Supreme Court on speed dial," Sotomayor wrote in a dissenting opinion.
Fellow liberal Justice Elena Kagan, who dissented from the court's decision to lift Murphy's injunction, nevertheless agreed with the majority on Thursday. "I do not see how a district court can compel compliance with an order that this court has stayed," Kagan wrote in a brief opinion.
Murphy's May 21 order mandating further procedures for the South Sudan-destined migrants prompted the U.S. government to keep the migrants at a military base in Djibouti. Murphy also clarified at the time that non-U.S. citizens must be given at least 10 days to raise a claim that they fear for their safety.
After the Supreme Court lifted Murphy's April injunction on June 23, the judge promptly ruled that his May 21 order "remains in full force and effect." Calling that ruling by the judge a "lawless act of defiance," the Justice Department the next day urged the Supreme Court to clarify that its action applied to Murphy's May 21 decision as well.
Murphy's ruling, the Justice Department said in court filings, has stalled its "lawful attempts to finalize the long-delayed removal of those aliens to South Sudan," and disrupted diplomatic relations.
Even as it accused the judge of defying the Supreme Court, the administration itself has been accused of violating judicial orders including in the third-country deportation litigation.
The administration has said its third-country policy is critical for removing migrants who commit crimes because their countries of origin are often unwilling to take them back.
The Supreme Court has a 6-3 conservative majority. Sotomayor in a dissent called the court's June 23 decision pausing Murphy's injunction a "gross abuse" of its power that now exposes "thousands to the risk of torture or death."
After the Department of Homeland Security moved in February to step up rapid deportations to third countries, immigrant rights groups filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of a group of migrants seeking to prevent their removal to such places without notice and a chance to assert the harms they could face.
In March, the administration issued guidance providing that if a third country has given credible diplomatic assurance that it will not persecute or torture migrants, individuals may be deported there "without the need for further procedures."
Murphy found that the administration's policy of "executing third-country removals without providing notice and a meaningful opportunity to present fear-based claims" likely violates due process requirements under the U.S. Constitution. Due process generally requires the government to provide notice and an opportunity for a hearing before taking certain adverse actions.
The Justice Department noted in a filing that the administration has received credible diplomatic assurances from South Sudan that the aliens at issue will not be subject to torture."
The Supreme Court has let Trump implement some contentious immigration policies while the fight over their legality continues to play out. In two decisions in May, it let Trump end humanitarian programs for hundreds of thousands of migrants to live and work in the United States temporarily. The justices, however, faulted the administration's treatment of some migrants as inadequate under constitutional due process protections.
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Even before that decision, the Supreme Court had helped Trump by lifting through emergency orders many of the pauses lower courts had put on Trump's efforts to slash and restructure the federal government and to rapidly deport migrants. The Roberts, Kavanaugh and Barrett trio There's no doubt about who was in control of a court that continues to move the law in a conservative direction though not as much as some justices want. Chief Justice John Roberts was in the majority on nearly every decision, followed closely by Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. On the decisions that divided the court, they sometimes sided with the three other conservatives including when they ruled that lower courts likely went too far when they blocked Trump's changes to birthright citizenship. The six conservatives were also united against the three liberals when they backed bans on gender affirming care for minors, age verification requirements for pornographic websites, states' efforts to defund Planned Parenthood, and parents' desire to remove their child from class when books with LGBTQ+ characters are being read. But at times Roberts, Kavanaugh and Barrett joined with the court's liberals - and against Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch. Those decisions included rejections of conservative challenges to Obamacare and to a federal subsidy program for internet and phone services for poor and rural communities that is funded by user fees. Don't like the Supreme Court's rulings? Chief Justice John Roberts has thoughts Religious groups Religious groups continued their recent winning streak at the high court though with an exception. On the biggest of the three cases brought by religious groups - the Oklahoma Catholic Church's bid to create the nation's first religious charter school - the court deadlocked 4-4. But that's because Barrett recused herself from the case, and the issue is expected to come back to the court with different participants that don't have ties to Barrett. The court has already teed up another religion-based case for the fall, whether prison officials can be sued for violating the religious rights of a Rastafarian inmate whose dreadlocks were forcibly shaved by Louisiana prison guards. TikTok The court in January unanimously upheld a law intended to effectively ban TikTok in the United States. So why is TikTok and its tens of millions of users a winner? Because Trump has repeatedly declined to enforce the law, saying he's working on an alternate solution to the national security concerns. More: Trump wins again. Conservatives like Amy Coney Barrett again. Supreme Court takeaways Losers 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals The appeals court that is arguably the most conservative in the country did not fare well again. The justices agreed to hear more appeals from the Louisiana-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals than from any other circuit and reversed more of its decisions, according to data compiled by SCOTUSblog. The times they did so included in rulings upholding the Biden administration's regulation of untraceable "ghost guns, the Food and Drug Administration's rejection of fruit- and candy-flavored vaping products, and Obamacare's requirement that insurers have to cover cancer screenings and other preventive care services recommended by a task force. Environmental regulations The court continued a years-long trend of narrowing federal protections for the environment, including taking away a tool the Environmental Protection Agency used to control water pollution. The court also let federal agencies scale back their environmental reviews of projects in a case involving construction of a railway in Utah. And the court said fuel producers can challenge California's standards for vehicle emissions and electric cars under a federal air pollution law. LGBTQ+ rights Five years after ruling that transgender people, as well as gay and lesbian people, are protected by a landmark civil rights law barring sex discrimination in the workplace, the court upheld Tennessee's ban on gender affirming care for minors, The ideologically divided court said the ban does not discriminate against transgender people because the restrictions turn on age and the purpose of the medical treatment, not whether the patient is transgender. In a different case, the court said parents with religious objections to books with LGBTQ+ characters must be allowed to remove their children from class when those books are being used. And in an emergency order, the court allowed Trump to enforce his ban on transgender people serving in the military while that policy is being challenged. Days after adjourning for the summer, the court announced it's taking up next term states' bans on transgender athletes joining female sports teams. Mixed results Gun regulations While the court said "ghost guns" can be subject to background checks and other requirements, it rejected Mexico's attempt to hold U.S. gunmakers liable for violence caused by Mexican drug cartels armed with their weapons. But gun violence prevention groups were relieved that, in siding with the gunmakers, the court didn't give the gun industry the broad immunity it sought. The groups are hopeful they can continue to hold gun makers accountable if they break the law. Parental rights While the court ruled against the Tennessee parents who want to get gender affirming care for their children, the justices backed parental rights in the case about LGBTQ+ storybooks. And the court's decision upholding Texas' age verification law for pornographic websites may have been foreshadowed during oral arguments when Barrett said she knows from her experience as a parent of seven children how difficult it is to keep up with the content blocking devices that those challenging Texas' law offered as a better alternative. Disability rights The court sided with a Minnesota teen trying to use the Americans with Disabilities Act to sue her school for not accommodating her rare form of epilepsy that makes it difficult to attend class before noon. That decision will make it easier for families to use the ADA to sue schools for damages over the lack of an accommodation for a learning disability. But the court sided against a retired firefighter who argued the ADA protects retirees as well as those able to work. The justices said the firefighter, who left the force due to Parkinson's disease, could not sue her former employer for reducing health care benefits for disabled retirees.
