President Donald Trump’s administration urged the Supreme Court on Tuesday to allow it to immediately deport a group of migrants currently being held on a US military base in Djibouti to South Sudan, saying the judge handling the case defied the high court.
The unusual motion came hours after a divided Supreme Court allowed the administration to resume deporting migrants to countries other than their homeland, including places like South Sudan, with minimal notice. Later Monday, a district court judge in Massachusetts ruled that the order didn’t apply to the specific migrants in Djibouti.
Describing the lower court’s order as “untenable,” the Trump administration accused US District Judge Brian Murphy of being in “defiance” of the Supreme Court’s order and suggested in its brief on Tuesday that the justices remove him from the case.
“The district court’s ruling of last night is indefensible,” the Department of Justice told the Supreme Court.
“The district court’s ruling of last night is a lawless act of defiance that, once again, disrupts sensitive diplomatic relations and slams the brakes on the executive’s lawful efforts to effectuate third-country removals,” the administration said.
As is often the case on the Supreme Court’s emergency docket, the order Monday afternoon provided little detail about the implications of the decision. The Trump administration had asked the justices to put on hold an order from Murphy, which found that the government’s efforts to deport migrants to third-party countries without additional due process “unquestionably” violated constitutional protections.
The Supreme Court granted that request, allowing the administration to continue those removals to third countries broadly while the litigation continues.
But later Monday, Murphy ruled that the Supreme Court’s order didn’t affect a group of immigrants being detained by the US at a military base in Djibouti – a group that has become a focal point in the fight over the removal policy. The migrants, including some from Cuba, Vietnam and Laos, were being held in a converted Conex shipping container.
Murphy said the government must continue to assess claims they make about fear of being tortured before removing them to South Sudan. He had mandated those assessments in a separate order on May 21 that the Trump administration did not appeal.
On Tuesday, the Justice Department also suggested the Supreme Court “may consider ordering that the case be reassigned to a different district judge.”
Administration attorneys urged the justices to “clarify” that its order Monday also covers Murphy’s separate May 21 order involving the migrants in Djibouti. If the Supreme Court agreed to do so, that would mean those migrants could be removed to South Sudan.
Humanitarian groups describe the situation in South Sudan as dire. The United Nations recently warned about food insecurity in the country, which is also facing political instability and escalating violence.
“There is currently no injunction in place barring the removal of the criminal aliens in Djibouti,” the Trump administration told the Supreme Court in its motion Tuesday. The district court’s ruling, it said, “is obviously wrong; and in turn, following this court’s stay, there is no longer any injunction limiting the government’s conduct here.”
In a sharply worded dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor on Monday slammed the Trump administration’s handling of immigration matters and accused her colleagues of “rewarding lawlessness” by backing its emergency appeal. The court’s two other liberals – Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson – joined that dissent.
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