Supreme Court Cosigns One of Trump’s Most Inhumane Immigration Practices

The Supreme Court on Tuesday cleared the way for the Trump administration to continue deporting people to countries where they have no ties and where they may face violence without even guaranteeing them a chance to contest the removal. 

Over the dissent of the three liberal justices, the Court stayed a lower court decision mandating that immigrants could not be deported to these “third countries” unless they were given notice and an opportunity to challenge their removal orders. 

The order was unsigned, and also added the case to the Court’s docket, fasttracking it to be argued in December. It came at the administration’s behest, and very quickly — just four days after Solicitor General John Sauer asked the court to pause the lower court order. 

The administration has weaponized these deportations to unsafe, or at least unfamiliar, countries, both using them as an impetus to get immigrants to self deport and as a means of inflicting harm on its favorite scapegoat. The Justice Department claims that it’s already sent over 25,000 people to countries including Honduras, Equatorial Guinea and Liberia. 

The Justice Department has already asked the Supreme Court to intercede twice to protect its policy. Once, it asked the justices to block an earlier ruling from U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy ordering that immigrants be told to which country they’d be sent and given a chance to challenge the removal. He also ruled that the Department of Homeland Security must lower its threshold to a “reasonable” fear that the deportees would face torture in order to reopen their immigration proceedings. The Supreme Court paused that order in June, allowing third-country deportations to continue in the meantime.

A day later, Sauer asked the Court to say explicitly that the administration could deport a group of immigrants to South Sudan (a country under a “do not travel” advisory from the State Department due to widespread violence and crime). The Court said yes to that too.

Earlier this month, the First Circuit Court of Appeals mostly upheld Murphy’s final order, that immigrants must be given a chance to challenge their deportations on the grounds of fear of persecution or torture. The Supreme Court has now stayed that order, letting the Trump administration continue the practice at least until the case is decided on the merits.

“The record shows that class members removed without meaningful notice or an opportunity to present country-specific protection claims have faced prolonged and arbitrary detention, beatings and sexual assault, disappearance, and chain refoulement to countries from which the United States had already granted them protection,” wrote the lawyers for four immigrants under removal orders in their request for the Supreme Court to deny the stay. “These harms cannot be undone.”

If the Supreme Court had denied the stay, it wouldn’t even have ended the third-country deportations; it just would have afforded these immigrants the slightest measure of due process. Even that, it seems, was too much.