Supreme Court allows Trump to restart swift deportation of migrants away from their home countries

WASHINGTON AP A divided Supreme Court on Monday allowed the Trump administration to restart swift removals of foreigners to countries other than their homelands lifting for now a court order requiring they get a chance to challenge the deportations The high court majority did not detail its reasoning in the brief order as is typical on its emergency docket All three liberal justices dissented from the order It came after immigration representatives put eight people on a plane to South Sudan in May U S District Judge Brian E Murphy in Boston discovered that violated his court order giving people a chance to argue they could be in danger of torture if sent away from their home countries The settlers from countries including Myanmar Vietnam and Cuba had been convicted of serious crimes in the U S and immigration administrators have reported that they were unable to return them fleetly to their home countries After Murphy stepped in leadership landed the plane at a U S naval base in Djibouti where the expatriates were housed in a converted shipping container and the officers guarding them faced rough conditions even as immigration attorneys waited for word from their clients The development comes amid a sweeping immigration crackdown by Republican President Donald Trump s administration which has pledged to deport millions of people who are living in the United States illegally Since specific countries do not accept U S deportations the administration has reached agreements with other countries including Panama and Costa Rica to house them South Sudan meanwhile has endured repeated waves of violence since gaining independence in Murphy s order doesn t prohibit deportations to third countries But it says refugees must have a real chance to argue they could be in serious danger of torture if sent to another country In a scathing -page dissent Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the court s action exposes thousands to the threat of torture or death The leadership has made clear in word and deed that it feels itself unconstrained by law free to deport anyone anywhere without notice or an opportunity to be heard she wrote in the dissent joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson The justices have confronted a similar issue in Trump s effort to send Venezuelans accused of being gang members to a notorious prison in El Salvador with little chance to challenge the deportations in court In that occurrence the court explained transients must get a reasonable time to file a court challenge before being removed and the majority blocked the administration from resuming the deportations while lower courts worked out exactly how long they should get The conservative-majority court has sided with Trump in other immigration cases however clearing the way for his administration to end temporary legal protections affecting a total of nearly a million immigrants The third-country deportation scenario has been one of several legal flashpoints as the administration rails against judges whose rulings have slowed the president s policies Another order from Murphy who was appointed by President Joe Biden resulted in the Trump administration returning a gay Guatemalan man who had been wrongly deported to Mexico where he says he had been raped and extorted The man identified in court papers as O C G was the first person known to have been returned to U S custody after deportation since the start of Trump s second term