The Supreme Court on Thursday cleared the way for the Trump administration to deport to South Sudan a group of migrants that have been held for weeks on a military base in Djibouti.
The high court’s unsigned order came days after a majority of justices allowed the administration to deport certain migrants to countries other than their homeland with little notice. But that June 23 decision kicked off a legal skirmish about the specific group of migrants being held in Djibouti.
A lower court had put their removal back on hold, prompting the Trump administration to race up to the Supreme Court. The court’s decision Thursday sided with the administration, over the dissent of two liberal justices, and allowed officials to remove the migrants at issue to South Sudan.
The Supreme Court said that its earlier decision applied the lower court’s actions “in full.”
A federal judge in Massachusetts ruled that the Supreme Court’s decision last month didn’t apply to eight migrants held in Djibouti because their court-ordered process was required by a separate ruling the administration never appealed.
The migrants, including some from Cuba, Vietnam and Laos, were being held in a converted Conex shipping container.
They were diverted to Djibouti on their way to South Sudan.
The lower court’s order involving the migrants in Djibouti “cannot now be used to enforce an injunction that” the Supreme Court later paused, the majority said on Thursday. “Such a remedy would serve to ‘coerce’ the government into ‘compliance’ and would be unenforceable given our stay of the underlying injunction,” the court wrote.
Justice Elena Kagan, a member of the court’s liberal wing, supported the decision. She wrote a brief concurring opinion noting that she had disagreed with the Supreme Court’s original decision to allow the third-country removals to continue.
“But a majority of this court saw things differently, and I do not see how a district court can compel compliance with an order that this court has stayed,” she wrote.
Supreme Court on ‘speed dial’
The decision drew a sharp dissent from the court’s two other liberals, Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
“What the government wants to do, concretely, is send the eight noncitizens it illegally removed from the United States from Djibouti to South Sudan, where they will be turned over to the local authorities without regard for the likelihood that they will face torture or death,” Sotomayor wrote.
“Today’s order clarifies only one thing,” she wrote. “Other litigants must follow the rules, but the administration has the Supreme Court on speed dial.”
The court’s decision last month was a significant win for the administration, which is attempting to rapidly deport migrants. One major hurdle for previous administrations has been dealing with countries who refuse to receive the return of their own nationals who have come to the US.
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. But the Trump administration is seeking to speed deportations by removing migrants to countries other than their homeland if their homeland will not accept them.
The so-called third-country removals have run up against the Convention Against Torture, ratified by the Senate in 1994, that generally bars deportation or extradition to countries where there is a possibility that the migrant might be tortured. The law is vague about how an administration is supposed to make that determination and what process rights a migrant is due.
The Trump administration has said that in cases where it has received “assurances” from a foreign government that a migrant removed there will not be tortured, officials do not have to notify a Cuban national, for instance, that he is being deported to South Sudan. In cases in which the government has not received those assurances, Department of Homeland Security policy requires the migrant to be notified so they can make a fear-of-torture claim.
In an unsigned order on June 23 over a dissent from the court’s liberal wing, the Supreme Court allowed the administration to continue that policy for now while the underlying legal challenge continues.
Sotomayor, the Supreme Court’s senior liberal, slammed the Trump administration’s handling of the migrants in a fiery dissent and accused the court of “rewarding lawlessness” by siding with Trump.
This story has been updated with additional details.
For more CNN news and newsletters create an account at CNN.com
