U.S. News

On Monday afternoon, the U.S. Supreme Court’s Republican appointees — with no reasoning — issued an order allowing the Trump administration to provide no notice to people it is deporting to a country with which the person has no connection and where the person could face great danger.

Justice Sonia Sotamayor, writing for herself and Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, issued a damning dissent.

“In matters of life and death, it is best to proceed with caution. In this case, the Government took the opposite approach,“ Sotomayor wrote, noting people who were wrongly deported to third countries — even in violation of the district court’s injunction in the case before the justices, Department of Homeland Security v. D.V.D. “Rather than allowing our lower court colleagues to manage this high-stakes litigation with the care and attention it plainly requires, this Court now intervenes to grant the Government emergency relief from an order it has repeatedly defied. I cannot join so gross an abuse of the Court’s equitable discretion.“

The Supreme Court’s order in D.V.D. is technically issued on the emergency, or shadow, docket as a stay of the district court’s injunction as the litigation proceeds. As such, it is not to be taken as a decision on the merits of the lawsuit — although the “likelihood” of success is supposed to be the key factor in granting a stay.

In practice, however, Monday’s order means the administration can send anyone who is deportable — meaning there is an order of removal in place as to them — anywhere that the government decides it wants to sent them, regardless of the dangers that a person might face if sent there and without any right to challenge that decision.