Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. slammed his Supreme Court colleagues for “hastily” blocking President Donald Trump’s latest round of deportations under the Alien Enemies Act.
Alito, 75, wrote a five-page dissent late Saturday night after the high court issued an emergency order that paused the deportation of alleged Venezuelan gang members who were potentially bound for an infamous El Salvador prison without due process.
The emergency order was issued with a 7-2 majority, with the conservative stalwarts Alito and Justice Clarence Thomas dissenting.
Alito, a George W. Bush appointee, said he opposed the order in part because the issue—raised by an appeal from the American Civil Liberties Union on Friday—had not properly played out in the lower courts, making it unclear if the Supreme Court had jurisdiction to weigh in yet.
“In sum, literally in the middle of the night, the court issued unprecedented and legally questionable relief,” Justice Alito wrote in his dissent, “without giving the lower courts a chance to rule, without hearing from the opposing party, within eight hours of receiving the application, with dubious factual support for its order, and without providing any explanation for its order.”
Alito added that the “unprecedented” relief was “hastily and prematurely granted.”
A quick ruling from the high court comes a month after the Trump administration ignored a federal order—issued by a Washington, D.C., district judge—to fly over 200 migrants to El Salvador.
Those deportation flights have come under intense scrutiny after it was revealed that as many as 90 percent of those on the flights—by Bloomberg’s count—did not have a criminal record in the U.S. and did not go through traditional removal proceedings.
The White House has justified those deportations, which included the removal of 29-year-old Kilmar Abrego Garcia after the DOJ admits it made an “administrative error,” by claiming those involved were gang members who could be shipped to a foreign prison without due process under the centuries-old Alien Enemies Act. The act has only been invoked three times in American history, with the most recent instance coming during World War II to hold Japanese-American civilians in internment camps.
The Trump administration has already filed paperwork urging the Supreme Court to lift its temporary hold on its second round of Alien Enemies Act deportations. For now, those slated to be on the next flights remain at a Texas detention center.
The high court’s Saturday order did not set a hard date for its pause to expire. It instead wrote the pause will remain “until further order of this court.”
The post Alito Rages at Fellow Conservatives for Blocking Mass Deportations appeared first on The Daily Beast.
