The Supreme Court on Friday blocked President Donald Trump from deporting a group of immigrants in northern Texas under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, siding with Venezuelans who feared they would be removed under the broad wartime authority.
The decision is a significant setback for Trump, who wants to use the law to expedite deportations and avoid the type of review that is typically required before removing people from the country.
However, the decision is only temporary, and the underlying legal battle over the president’s invocation will continue in several federal courts across the country.
The justices remanded the case to an appeals court to resolve the underlying issues, including whether the president’s action is legal and, if so, how much notice the migrants targeted by the act should receive.
Two conservative justices, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, publicly expressed their disagreement.
The court’s unsigned opinion was particularly critical of how the government was handling the removals, as well as how US District Judge James Hendrix had handled the case previously.
The court cited a previous case in which a Maryland man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, was mistakenly removed to El Salvador. The court acknowledged that the Trump administration has stated that it is “unable to provide for the return of an individual deported in error to a prison in El Salvador.”
Given this, the court stated that “the detainees’ interests at stake are accordingly particularly weighty.” In other words, the court was saying it is critical to get the legal questions right before people are removed, potentially permanently.
The court added that the Trump administration’s handling of the removals did not “pass muster.” The justices specifically cited the 24-hour notice, which was “devoid of information about how to exercise due process rights to contest that removal.”
The Supreme Court returned the case to the New Orleans-based 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals for further review, stating in its order that the appeals court erred in dismissing the detainees’ appeal.
“Today’s ruling effectively extends the temporary freeze that the justices put on Alien Enemies Act removals from the Northern District of Texas back on April 19,” said Steve Vladeck, CNN Supreme Court analyst and Georgetown Law professor. “Because lower courts have blocked use of the act in every other district in which the president has sought to invoke it, that means it’s effectively pausing all removals under the act until the 5th Circuit – and, presumably, the Supreme Court itself – conclusively resolves whether they’re legal and how much process is due if so.”
The court also appeared to criticize Hendrix, whom Trump nominated to the bench during his first term, for handling the case. Hendrix declined to halt the removals, claiming that the ACLU was attempting to rush the district court into action.
“Here the District Court’s inaction – not for 42 minutes but for 14 hours and 28 minutes – had the practical effect of refusing an injunction to detainees facing an imminent threat of severe, irreparable harm,” the judge wrote in his decision.
Alito, in a 14-page dissent joined by Thomas, argued that the high court had erred in intervening at this time and sharply criticized it for instructing the appeals court on how to handle the case before the district court had finished handling it.
He wrote, “The court has blazed a new trail.” It took a case from a district court and resolved significant issues in the first instance. To my eyes, that appears to be an expansion of our original jurisdiction.
Alito initially dissented when the court first granted interim relief to the migrants last month.
In a brief concurrence, Justice Brett Kavanaugh stated that while he agreed with the court’s decision, he would have heard the case in its entirety now.
“The circumstances call for a prompt and final resolution, which likely can be provided only by this Court,” according to him. “Rather, consistent with the executive branch’s request for expedition – and as the detainees themselves urge – I would grant certiorari, order prompt briefing, hold oral argument soon thereafter, and then resolve the legal issues.”
The comments from Kavanaugh come a day after the Supreme Court debated whether to consider the merits of another of Trump’s controversial immigration policies, his bid to end birthright citizenship, which had only been brought before it on an emergency basis.
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Trump claimed in a social media post Friday that the Supreme Court “WON’T ALLOW US TO GET CRIMINALS OUT OF OUR COUNTRY” following the court’s decision.
Lower courts wrestle with key legal questions
The decision came as lower courts across the country grappled with Trump’s implementation of the Alien Enemies Act, which was prompted by an earlier Supreme Court order requiring cases to be filed in separate district courts rather than on a nationwide basis.
Federal courts in Texas, Nevada, Colorado, and other states have issued orders preventing the administration from relying on the law, at least in the short term, while judges consider a slew of lawsuits filed by targeted migrants.
Several courts have also issued more permanent orders prohibiting the law’s use, and on May 2, a Trump-appointed judge in Southern Texas ruled that the president had illegally invoked the Alien Enemies Act.
Following through on a campaign promise, Trump used the act in mid-March to expedite the deportation of alleged members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.
Perhaps sensing impending litigation, the administration rushed to load hundreds of Venezuelans onto planes bound for El Salvador, where they remain today.
After lower courts temporarily blocked the government from carrying out additional deportations, the Trump administration filed an appeal with the Supreme Court in late March, citing “sensitive national-security-related operations” and requesting that the removals resume.
On April 7, the Supreme Court issued a murky, unsigned order that technically allowed Trump to continue using the law while blocking a legal pathway civil rights groups were attempting to use to challenge Trump’s invocation of the law in order to completely prohibit its use.
However, the court ruled that migrants facing deportation under the Alien Enemies Act were entitled to notice and the opportunity to challenge their removal through federal habeas corpus petitions – suits filed by people who claim they are being unlawfully detained by the government – resulting in a partial victory for migrants.
The American Civil Liberties Union, which represents the migrants, has filed a series of habeas corpus lawsuits to protect identified migrants as well as “similarly situated” Venezuelans who may be targeted under the Alien Enemies Act.
Several lower courts, including one in New York and another in Texas, issued new temporary orders prohibiting the administration from deporting people under the act while those cases are heard.
Importantly, those orders only applied to the geographic regions over which the specific federal courts had jurisdiction.
Immigrant rights groups reported in mid-April that a number of Venezuelan detainees in northern Texas who were not covered by the earlier orders began receiving notices from the government that they were subject to deportation under the act.
Some of the immigrants held at the Bluebonnet Detention Center in Anson, Texas, were told they could be deported in less than 24 hours.
These notices “cannot by any stretch be said to comply with this court’s order that notice must be sufficient to permit individuals actually to seek habeas review,” the American Civil Liberties Union stated in a brief.
Two immigrants filed a habeas petition in a federal district court in Abilene, Texas, requesting a temporary halt to their deportation and the removal of “similarly situated” people detained at Bluebonnet.
Hendrix denied the request for the two migrants, stating that the government had “answered unequivocally” that it did not intend to remove them, so they were not in immediate danger of deportation.
The issue of Alien Enemies Act enforcement was then referred to the Supreme Court. On April 19, a majority of justices issued an early morning order temporarily prohibiting the Trump administration from deporting any Venezuelans in Texas who could be targeted under the act so that it could investigate further.
