The Supreme Court in an apparent 7-2 decision Thursday cleared the way for the Trump administration to restart plans to deport a group of convicted criminals to the war-torn country of South Sudan who have no ties there.
Last month, the high court lifted U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy’s injunction that limited the administration from deporting migrants to third countries without giving them sufficient opportunity to raise torture claims.
Murphy continued to insist that his subsequent ruling, which found the May South Sudan flight violated the injunction, was still in “full force.” The administration contended it amounted to open defiance of the justices and asked them to again rebuke the judge.
“The May 21 remedial order cannot now be used to enforce an injunction that our stay rendered unenforceable,” the Supreme Court’s unsigned ruling reads, confirming all of Murphy’s rulings are void.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissented. They rejected the notion that Murphy was at fault, instead pinning the blame on the administration and their colleagues.
“The Court’s continued refusal to justify its extraordinary decisions in this case, even as it faults lower courts for failing properly to divine their import, is indefensible,” Sotomayor wrote.
She added that the ruling “clarifies only one thing: Other litigants must follow the rules, but the administration has the Supreme Court on speed dial.”
Justice Elena Kagan, the court’s third Democratic-appointed justice, said she agreed with the administration this time despite continuing to believe it should’ve lost before.
“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,” Kagan wrote.
Federal authorities have kept custody over the group of eight migrants, who have serious criminal records, on a military base in Djibouti ever since Murphy intervened in May.
“The Supreme Court’s order rewards the government for violating the preliminary injunction in this case and for delaying provision of the due process protections that the district court ordered, which included a determination on whether they had a reasonable fear of being persecuted or tortured there. All eight have such a fear,” the National Immigration Litigation Alliance, which represents the migrants, said in a statement.
Though the litigation will continue in the lower courts, Thursday’s ruling means that no court injunction is currently blocking the administration from again trying to move the migrants to South Sudan.
Updated 5:36 p.m. ET
