Trump administration lawyers urged the Supreme Court in a court filing Saturday afternoon to reject an emergency request to temporarily block deportations of Venezuelans under a rarely invoked 18th-century wartime law.
Solicitor General D. John Sauer asked the justices to “dissolve” the administrative stay they had issued early Saturday that blocked the deportations while they considered the application, and to allow lower courts to weigh in before intervening further in the case.
The deportations remain paused while the justices consider the matter. In emergency applications, the Supreme Court can act at any time.
In his filing, Mr. Sauer called the request by lawyers for the migrants that the justices step in “fatally premature” and argued that they had “improperly skipped over the lower courts.”
He said that the government had provided advance notice to detainees subject to imminent deportation and that they “have had adequate time to file” claims challenging their removal. Mr. Sauer added that the government had agreed it would not deport any detainees with pending claims.
The 17-page court filing came hours after a rare overnight ruling by the justices, who in a one-page, unsigned order had blocked the Trump administration from deporting the migrants.
It was the latest twist in a fast-moving, high-stakes legal battle over the administration’s efforts to deport Venezuelan migrants accused of being members of Tren de Aragua, a violent gang.
On Friday, lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union mounted challenges in lower courts to prevent what they claimed was the imminent removal of Venezuelans who were scheduled to be flown out of the country from a detention center in Texas.
The lawyers then filed an emergency application with the Supreme Court, asking it to step in and temporarily block the deportations to protect the detainees as part of a proposed class action. The A.C.L.U. lawyers asked the court to move swiftly, claiming that some of the migrants had been loaded onto buses, presumably to be taken to the airport.
In his filing, Mr. Sauer said the A.C.L.U. had rushed to an appeals court and the Supreme Court without giving lower courts time to consider the case.
“Nonetheless, without waiting for the government to file its opposition brief and after giving the district court just 42 minutes to rule, applicants immediately sought emergency relief in the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and then in this court,” he wrote.
In their overnight order, the justices used formal language to request a response from the government. “The solicitor general is invited to file a response to the application before this court as soon as possible,” they wrote.
Mr. Sauer argued that the migrants had been given “adequate” notice of the government’s intent to deport them. He did not directly address claims by the A.C.L.U. that some of the notices were in English only, saying that “a detainee’s language ability or his family’s pre-existing relationship with a lawyer may well be relevant to a court’s determination of the adequacy of a particular notice.”
He also did not directly address the accusations that migrants might have been on buses and heading to the airport. The A.C.L.U. was “speculating” that migrants would be “removed imminently, before their claims can be further tested,” Mr. Sauer wrote.
He also pushed back against the group’s argument that the justices should protect the detainees as part of a proposed class action. The government had argued that the determination of whether a detainee under the Alien Enemies Act was entitled to court relief was “inherently too individualized” to treat them all as a class.
Abbie VanSickle covers the United States Supreme Court for The Times. She is a lawyer and has an extensive background in investigative reporting.
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