Top US court hands Trump victory on deportations as SCOTUS challenge looms
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A federal appeals court on Wednesday granted the Trump administration’s request to pause a lower court order blocking its deportation of illegal immigrants to so-called “third countries”; This gave the administration a short-term reprieve just hours before the lower court’s decision took effect.
Trump administration lawyers appealed the ruling last week in the First Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals, arguing that U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy’s order constituted an “unworkable scheme” that threatened to derail sensitive negotiations with foreign countries and risked derailing “thousands” of planned deportations.
They also defended Murphy’s decision last year against the Supreme Court’s two earlier emergency stays, after the high court intervened and allowed the administration to continue its deportation policy for now.
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President Donald Trump signed the executive order at the White House. (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
As senior Trump administration officials acknowledged earlier this year, the case is almost certain to head to the high court for a full review of its merits.
Murphy, a Biden appointee, sided with immigrants in his 81-page decision last month, finding that the Department of Homeland Security’s removal process — or the process of removing immigrants from the U.S. to a country other than their country of origin — was illegal and violated. due process protections Under the US Constitution.
He ruled that the Trump administration should first try to deport immigrants to their home country or to the deportation country previously determined by an immigration judge. Only after this process, he said, could migrants be sent to a third country as long as “meaningful notice” was provided and migrants were given the opportunity to raise any fear of persecution in the third country designated for deportation under the so-called “reasonable fear” interview.
In his ruling, Murphy wrote that the third-country deportation policy “failed to satisfy due process for many reasons,” but he stayed the policy from taking effect for 15 days to give the administration time to appeal.
Barring intervention from a U.S. appeals court, the ruling was scheduled to take effect Thursday.
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Attorney General Pam Bondi holds a press conference at the Department of Justice. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc. via Getty Images)
DHS officials have previously claimed they have “unquestionable authority” to deport illegal immigrants to third countries that agree to accept them.
“If these activist judges had their way, aliens—including convicted murderers, child rapists, and drug traffickers—who were so barbaric that their own countries would not take them back, would be walking free on American streets,” former Deputy Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in June, after the Supreme Court temporarily allowed the Trump administration to continue its deportation policy in the face of legal challenges.
Murphy presided over the class-action lawsuit for months applied by immigrants challenges deportations to third countries, including South Sudan, El Salvador, and Costa Rica and Guatemala; The Trump administration is reportedly taking this into consideration in its ongoing wave of deportations.
He sparred with the Trump administration, including in May while it was overseeing the case, when he accused the administration of failing to comply with a court order requiring the United States to keep six immigrants deported to South Sudan in U.S. custody.
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The facade of the Supreme Court building is seen at dusk. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Murphy had previously ordered the migrants to remain in U.S. custody at a military base in Djibouti until each was given a “reasonable fear interview” or a chance to explain to U.S. authorities whether they had any fear of persecution or torture if detained in South Sudan.
Murphy had previously acknowledged those criminal histories after Trump officials described those suspended as the “worst of the worst.”
“The court recognizes that the class members at issue here have criminal histories,” Murphy wrote in an order last year.
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“But this does not change due process,” he wrote. “The court treats the obligation to comply with these principles with a seriousness that should be understood by all those committed to the rule of law.”
