The Supreme Court on Thursday allowed the government to deport eight men who have spent more than a month held under guard on an American military base on Djibouti to South Sudan, granting a request from the Trump administration.
The order allows the government to immediately send the men, who hail from countries around the world, to war-torn South Sudan. Neither the United States nor South Sudan has said what will happen to the men on their arrival.
Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.
The court last month paused a trial judge’s ruling that all migrants whom the government seeks to deport to countries other than their own must first be given a chance to show that they would face risk of torture. That order was brief and gave no reasons, which is typical when the justices act on emergency applications.
Within hours, lawyers for the eight men returned to the judge, Brian E. Murphy of the U.S. District Court in Boston, asking him to continue blocking the deportations of the group.
Judge Murphy, who was appointed by President Joseph R. Biden Jr., denied the motion as unnecessary. He said he had issued a separate ruling last month, different from the one the Supreme Court had paused, protecting the men in Djibouti from immediate removal.
He added that Justice Sonia Sotomayor had made the same point in her dissent from the ruling, which Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson joined. “The district court’s remedial orders are not properly before this court because the government has not appealed them,” she wrote.
In Thursday’s ruling, the majority rejected that distinction, paused both sets of rulings and allowed the deportations to South Sudan.
Justice Elena Kagan, who dissented previously, this time issued a concurring opinion. “I do not see how a district court can compel compliance with an order that this court has stayed,” she wrote.
Thursday’s order was the latest in a series of rulings related to immigration decided by the justices in summary fashion on what critics call the court’s shadow docket.
Some early decisions insisted on due process — notice and an opportunity to be heard — for migrants before they are deported.
More recent orders lifted protections for hundreds of thousands of people who had been granted temporary protected status or humanitarian parole, allowing them to be deported. And the rulings concerning so-called third-country deportations to places other than migrants’ home nations appeared to give little weight to due process.
The court’s recent moves have been cheered by the Trump administration, which has been negotiating with countries around the world to get them to accept deportees to help speed its efforts to remove thousands of migrants. “Fire up the deportation planes,” a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security said after the court’s ruling on third-country deportations last month.
Though Judge Murphy’s initial ruling applied to many migrants, it captured public attention in May when the government loaded eight men onto a plane said to be headed to South Sudan, a violence-plagued African country that most of them had never set foot in.
Their flight landed instead in the East African nation of Djibouti. The men, who have all been convicted of serious crimes in the United States, have been detained at Camp Lemonnier, a military base, for many weeks. They spend almost all of their time inside a modular, air-conditioned container that the military usually uses as a conference room, according to court filings. Under constant guard, they wear shackles around their ankles, except when showering, using the bathroom or meeting remotely with their lawyers, a member of their legal team said.
Before coming to the United States, they hailed from Vietnam, South Korea, Mexico, Laos, Cuba and Myanmar. Just one is from South Sudan.
Adam Liptak covers the Supreme Court and writes Sidebar, a column on legal developments. A graduate of Yale Law School, he practiced law for 14 years before joining The Times in 2002.
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