'Gross abuse': Liberal Supreme Court justices rip ruling on Trump deportations
In the U.S. Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling Monday that permitted President Donald Trump to resume migrant deportations to countries like El Salvador and Guatemala, the three dissenting judges slammed the decision as a “gross abuse of the court’s equitable discretion.”
Invoking the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, Trump first ordered the deportation of migrants to foreign countries in March, sending hundreds to El Salvador’s notoriously dangerous CECOT prison, including a Maryland man with protected legal status due to an “administrative error.” While federal judges would shortly thereafter issue orders to halt the deportations, the Trump administration would continue to deport dozens of migrants to foreign nations.
It was that continued defiance of federal court orders, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissenting opinion, signed onto by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Jackson, that led to her decision to vote against staying a preliminary injunction blocking continued deportations.
“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,” Sotomayor wrote. “I cannot join so gross an abuse of the Court’s equitable discretion.”
Sotomayor went on to condemn the Trump administration’s blatant defiance of federal court orders as reckless in what she called a "matter of life and death.”
“It wrongfully deported one plaintiff to Guatemala, even though an immigration judge found he was likely to face torture there,” she wrote.
“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.”