The Supreme Court on Thursday ruled the Trump administration can deport eight illegal migrants with violent criminal convictions to South Sudan — despite only one of them being from the war-torn country.
The Trump administration contends the men committed crimes so “monstrous and barbaric” that no other country would take them.
The migrants include a sex offender from Myanmar and a convicted murderer from Laos — and others from Cuba and Vietnam.
Liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, but Elana Kagan joined the majority in siding with the Trump administration.
The ruling follows the high court’s 6-3 decision last month to allow the Trump administration to resume deporting migrants to countries other than their home nation — so-called “third countries” — with limited notice.
The eight foreign nationals have been detained at a US military base in Djibouti since May, when a federal judge appointed by former President Joe Biden blocked the Trump administration from sending the men to South Sudan.
Despite the Supreme Court’s June 23 ruling, Boston-based District Judge Brian Murphy continued to insist that his injunction against the South Sudan deportations remained in “full force and effect” — prompting the Trump administration to ask the Supreme Court to clarify the ruling.
“The only authority [Murphy] cited was the dissent from the stay order,” the justices in the majority noted Thursday.
“The May 21 remedial order cannot now be used to enforce an injunction that our stay rendered unenforceable,” the unsigned ruling stated, confirming that the Biden-appointed judge’s injunction is no longer valid.
Kagan, in a concurring opinion, noted that while she previously dissented in cases on the Trump administration’s efforts to deport migrants to third countries, “a majority of this Court saw things differently.”
“I do not see how a district court can compel compliance with an order that this Court has stayed,” she wrote.
Meanwhile, Sotomayor argued that the Supreme Court’s “refusal to justify its extraordinary decisions in this case, even as it faults lower courts for failing properly to divine their import, is indefensible.”
“The Court’s Rules make plain where the Government should have pressed its argument about the nature and validity of the remedial order: before the lower courts,” the justice wrote. “The Government undisputedly did not comply with that Rule.”
“Today’s order clarifies only one thing,” Sotomayor fumed. “Other litigants must follow the rules, but the administration has the Supreme Court on speed dial.”
Litigation on the merits of deporting the criminal migrants to South Sudan will continue in the lower courts, but the high court’s ruling clears the way for the Trump administration to send the eight men to the African nation in the meantime.
