The Supreme Court on Monday allowed the Trump administration to deport migrants to countries other than their own, pausing a federal judge’s ruling that they must first be given a chance to show that they would face the risk of torture and letting the administration send men held at a U.S. military base in Djibouti on to South Sudan.
The court’s brief order gave no reasons and said the judge’s ruling would remain paused while the government pursues an appeal and, after that, until the Supreme Court acts. The court’s three liberal members issued a lengthy dissent.
The order was the latest in a series of rulings related to immigration decided by the justices in summary fashion on what critics call its shadow docket. Among those rulings were ones calling for due process for migrants before they are deported under a rarely invoked 18th-century wartime law.
Other rulings allowed the administration to lift protections for hundreds of thousands of people who had been granted temporary protected status or humanitarian parole.
This case arose from a trial judge’s order that applies to migrants cleared for removal from the United States whom the administration seeks to deport to third countries — ones where they do not hold citizenship and where they may have no connection. The judge said such migrants were entitled to due process, meaning notice of where they were going and the chance to argue that they were at risk of harm if sent there.
Though the judge’s order 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, where there is an American military base, and they have been held there ever since. The judge, Brian E. Murphy of the U.S. District Court in Boston, ruled that the men must be given access to lawyers and a chance to challenge the government’s plan to send them to South Sudan.
There were eight deportees aboard the flight to Djibouti. One is South Sudanese, and the government has said that another will be sent to Myanmar, his home country, leaving the six others in limbo. All eight have been convicted of violent crimes.
