Supreme Court enables illegal Trump administration deportations | Opinion

There are times when I despair as to whether the Supreme Court will uphold the law and times when I worry that the conservative justices will just be a rubber stamp approving the terrible policies of the Trump administration.

That was my reaction on June 23 when the Supreme Court lifted a lower court order preventing President Donald Trump from deporting people to South Sudan.

This action by the Trump administration is clearly illegal.

Federal law is quite specific as to where a person can be deported to. For example, it says that when possible, a person should be deported to the country from which the person was admitted to the United States (if a person came to the United States from Mexico, for example, they should be deported to Mexico).

In other instances, a person could be deported to the country “in which is located the foreign port” from which the non-citizen left for the United States (if a person from Guatemala came through Mexico, that person could be deported to Mexico).

Federal law also allows deporting a person to the country in which the person resided before entering the United States (if a person from China came to Mexico and then unlawfully entered the United States, they could be returned to Mexico). The statute also provides that a person can be deported to the country where they were born.

If none of these options are possible, however, only then can the government pick the place it wants to deport a person to. The final clause of the statute says: “If impracticable, inadvisable or impossible to remove the (non-citizen) to each country described,” a person can be deported to “another country whose government will accept the (person) into that country.” It is clear that this final category is meant to be a last resort.

The Trump administration’s deporting Venezuelans and Cubans to a prison in South Sudan blatantly violates the law. These individuals have no connection whatsoever to South Sudan, and they now face brutal conditions. A federal district court issued a preliminary injunction against this. The federal court of appeals affirmed.

Surprisingly, on June 23, the Supreme Court reversed and lifted the preliminary injunction and allowed the deportations to proceed. Most stunning, there was no opinion written by any of the six justices in the majority — not one word of explanation. It was just an order reversing the lower court.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a blistering dissent, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

“In matters of life and death, it is best to proceed with caution,” Sotomayor wrote. “In this case, the government took the opposite approach. It wrongfully deported one plaintiff to Guatemala, even though an Immigration Judge found he was likely to face torture there. Then, in clear violation of a court order, it deported six more to South Sudan, a nation the State Department considers too unsafe for all but its most critical personnel. An attentive District Court’s timely intervention only narrowly prevented a third set of unlawful removals to Libya.

“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.”

When the district court took further steps to require that the government comply with the law, the Supreme Court on July 3 immediately stepped in to allow the deportations to go forward. Once more, Sotomayor dissented:

“What the government wants to do, concretely, is send the eight non-citizens it illegally removed from the United States from Djibouti to South Sudan, where they will be turned over to the local authorities without regard for the likelihood that they will face torture or death,” the justice wrote.

In deporting people to a maximum security prison in El Salvador or Djibouti or South Sudan or Libya, what the Trump administration is doing is not only illegal, it is cruel and inhumane. In all of these foreign prisons, those deported are likely to be tortured and some will be killed. When the Trump administration deported Kilmar Armando Ábrego García to a notorious prison in El Salvador, he was brutally tortured.

It is terrible that our government is doing this, but it is unconscionable that the Supreme Court stepped in to make sure it could happen. The court exists to ensure that the Constitution and the laws of the United States are enforced, not to be a rubber stamp for the president.

Although it is a fraught analogy, I cannot help but think of all the judges in Nazi Germany who facilitated sending people to their death in concentration camps. History condemns those judges, and I have no doubt history will decry these rulings as well.

This story was originally published July 20, 2025 at 6:00 AM with the headline "Supreme Court enables illegal Trump administration deportations | Opinion."