SCOTUS allows Trump admin to deport people to random countries with no notice

Justice Sotomayor called the order a "gross ... abuse" of the court's authority. Also: Law Dork in the media.

Jun 23, 2025

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.

This is a horrifying order that shows a disdain for basic principles of human rights — made all the more unconscionable by the fact that the Republican appointees provided no reasoning in doing so and on the shadow docket without the benefit of argument or full briefing.

It also follows a pair of orders from last month on the shadow docket that similarly allowed the Trump administration to carry out anti-immigrant orders during litigation.

The underlying preliminary injunction at issue in D.V.D., issued by U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy, a Biden appointee, in April is an extremely modest one. All that Murphy was requiring of the Trump administration when it wished to carry out third country removals — or, deportations in which the person is sent to a country where they neither were born nor have other legal status — is this:

Accordingly, the Court circumscribes its remedy and declines, at this time, to require the full extent of process Plaintiffs propose. Instead, the Court orders that, prior to removing any alien to a third country, i.e., any country not explicitly provided for on the alien's order of removal, Defendants must: (1) provide writen notice to the alien and the alien's immigration counsel, if anyt?_ of the third country to which the alien may be removed, in a language the alien can understand; (2) provide meaningful opportunity for the alien to raise a fear of return for eligibility

for CAT protections; (3) move to reopen the proceedings if the alien demonstrates "reasonable fear",48 and (4) if the alien is not found to have demonstrated "reasonable fear," provide meaningful opportunity, and a minimum of 15 days,4 for that alien to seek to move to reopen immigration proceedings to challenge the potential third-country removal.

On Monday, with no explanation, at least five of the six Republican appointees to the Supreme Court told Trump, America, and the world that they believe Murphy likely went too far by requiring even such minimal process.

What’s more, the Republican appointees did so even in the wake of Murphy needing to issue follow-up “clarification” orders three times in the case to address the Trump administration’s efforts to mount an end-run around or outright ignore his order.

In light of that, Roberts’s court is sending an alarming message to district court judges in this moment: “We don’t have your back.”

In dissent, Sotomayor detailed the multiple times Murphy had to clarify his injunction due to Trump administration actions — including one move that led Murphy to issue a ruling that the administration had violated the preliminary injunction when it tried to send people to South Sudan, a nation where the Trump administration removed all but essential personnel earlier this year.

“For centuries, courts have ‘close[d] the doors’ of equity to those ‘tainted with inequitableness or bad faith relative to the matter in which [they] see[k] relief,’” Sotomayor wrote, quoting from other cases that amount to a rule that courts don’t grant relief like a stay if the party seeking the relief has been behaving badly.

She continued to note that “the Government had a duty to obey the[ district court’s orders] until they were “‘reversed by orderly and proper proceedings,’” calling the principle “a bedrock of the rule of law” and asserting that the Trump administration’s “misconduct threatens it to its core.”

Linking the Supreme Court’s majority to the Trump administration’s misconduct, Sotomayor then wrote:

She was not done, writing for the liberals that the government’s arguments on the merits of the case were weak, particularly in light of its actions:

On the merits of its appeal, the Government principally raises a bevy of jurisdictional objections. Given its conduct in these proceedings, the Government’s posture resembles that of the arsonist who calls 911 to report firefighters for violating a local noise ordinance. In any event, the Govern- ment has not established a likelihood of success on any of its arguments.

The “right to be heard” before government action would cause you harm “is a principle basic to our society,“ Sotomayor noted, adding, “Being deprived of the right not to be deported to a country likely to torture or kill you plainly counts. Thus, plaintiffs have a right to be heard.”

She concluded:

The Due Process Clause represents ‘the principle that ours is a government of laws, not of men, and that we submit ourselves to rulers only if under rules.’ Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, 343 U. S. 579, 646 (1952) (Jackson, J., concurring). By rewarding lawlessness, the Court once again undermines that foundational principle.

And, in granting this lawlessness, the Roberts court has undoubtedly empowered the Trump administration to try and push the country even further into that lawlessness.

Law Dork in the media

I spoke with Imara Jones the afternoon of the U.S. v. Skrmetti decision for TransLash, and we dove deep into what happened and what we were thinking about that afternoon.