Sometime very early Saturday morning, the U.S. Supreme Court released a temporary stay order. This order prevents the Trump administration from deporting a subset of Venezuelan migrants that the administration has targeted as having gang affiliations under the rarely invoked Alien Enemies Act of 1798. This decision was made around 12:55 a.m. ET (0455 GMT) and came as a response to an emergency request from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which argued that the migrants were facing imminent deportation without sufficient opportunity to contest their removal.
During all of this, the Trump administration has continued to assert that its executive authority gives it sweeping powers to act on immigration issues. The administration alleges that each of the detainees has ties to Tren de Aragua. Nonetheless, they have made little, if any, attempt to back up this assertion with factual evidence. Under pressure from the Trump administration, over 200 of them were deported last month to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador. The majority of these people are Venezuelans and Salvadorans, and administration officials say they belong to a terrorist gang.
The ACLU’s legal team urged the Supreme Court to intervene, emphasizing that prior rulings mandated judicial review for migrants facing deportation. They argued that the detainees were denied meaningful access to judicial review of their deportation orders, amounting to a constitutional violation.
Justice Samuel Alito assailed the court’s majority decision in a strong dissenting opinion joined by Justice Clarence Thomas. In a rare dissent, he voiced his exasperation with the court’s practices. He claimed that they moved too quickly, wrote their ruling too quickly, and without consideration from lower courts and from the other side.
“In sum, literally in the middle of the night, the Court issued unprecedented and legally questionable relief without giving the lower courts a chance to rule, without hearing from the opposing party, within eight hours of receiving the application, with dubious factual support for its order, and without providing any explanation for its order.” – Justice Samuel Alito
The unsigned en banc decision bars the government from deporting any member of the detainee plaintiff class. This is only true until the court orders otherwise. The White House took the ruling in stride, with press secretary Sean Spicer stating that President Donald Trump would double down on his hardline immigration agenda. Until now, there had been no clear sign that the administration was ready to brazenly ignore the Supreme Court’s order.