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The Supreme Court on Friday blocked President Donald Trump from moving forward with deportations under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act for a group of immigrants in northern Texas, siding with Venezuelans who feared they were poised for imminent removal under the sweeping wartime authority.
The decision is a significant loss for Trump, who wants to use the law to speed deportations – and avoid the kind of review normally required before removing people from the country. But the decision is also temporary and the underlying legal fight over the president’s invocation will continue in multiple federal courts across the country.
The justices sent the case at issue back to an appeals court to decide the underlying questions in the case, including whether the president’s move is legal and, if it is, how much notice the migrants targeted under the act should receive.
Two conservative justices – Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito – publicly noted their dissent.
The court’s unsigned opinion was notably pointed about how the government was attempting to handle the removals and also how US District Judge James Hendrix had dealt with the case at an earlier stage.
The court referenced another case that had reached it previously, that of the Maryland man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was mistakenly removed to El Salvador. The court noted that the Trump administration has represented that it is “unable to provide for the return of an individual deported in error to a prison in El Salvador.”
Given that, the court said, “the detainees’ interests at stake are accordingly particularly weighty.” In other words, the court was saying it is important to get the legal questions correct before people are removed, potentially, forever.
The court added that the way the Trump administration was handling the removals did not “pass muster.” Specifically, the justices pointed to notice of only 24 hours that was “devoid of information about how to exercise due process rights to contest that removal.”
The Supreme Court sent the case back to the New Orleans-based 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals for further review, saying in its order that the appeals court erred in dismissing the detainees’ appeal.
“Today’s ruling effectively extends the temporary freeze that the justices put on Alien Enemies Act removals from the Northern District of Texas back on April 19,” said Steve Vladeck, CNN Supreme Court analyst and professor at Georgetown Law. “Because lower courts have blocked use of the act in every other district in which the president has sought to invoke it, that means it’s effectively pausing all removals under the act until the 5th Circuit – and, presumably, the Supreme Court itself – conclusively resolves whether they’re legal and how much process is due if so.”
The court also appeared to criticize how Hendrix, whom Trump nominated to the bench in his first term, had handled the case. Hendrix declined to halt the removals and argued in his opinion that the ACLU was attempting to rush the district court to act.
“Here the District Court’s inaction – not for 42 minutes but for 14 hours and 28 minutes – had the practical effect of refusing an injunction to detainees facing an imminent threat of severe, irreparable harm,” the court wrote.
Alito, in a 14-page dissent joined by Thomas, said that the high court had wrongly intervened at this time and sharply criticized it for telling the appeals court how to handle the case before it was fully handled by the district court.
The court, he wrote, “has blazed a new trail. It has plucked a case from a district court and decided important issues in the first instance. To my eyes, that looks far too much like an expansion of our original jurisdiction.”
Alito had initially dissented when the court first issued interim relief to the migrants last month.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh, in a brief concurrence, said he agreed with the court’s decision but would have taken up the case in full now.
“The circumstances call for a prompt and final resolution, which likely can be provided only by this Court,” he wrote. “Rather, consistent with the executive branch’s request for expedition – and as the detainees themselves urge – I would grant certiorari, order prompt briefing, hold oral argument soon thereafter, and then resolve the legal issues.”
The comments from Kavanaugh come a day after the high court grappled with whether it should consider the merits of another one of Trump’s controversial immigration policies – his bid to end birthright citizenship – that had only landed before it on an emergency basis.
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Trump claimed in a social media post Friday that the Supreme Court “WON’T ALLOW US TO GET CRIMINALS OUT OF OUR COUNTRY” after the court’s decision.
The decision came as lower courts across the country are wrestling with Trump’s implementation of the Alien Enemies Act, a result of an earlier Supreme Court order that required the cases to be filed in separate district courts rather than on a nationwide basis. Federal courts in Texas, Nevada, Colorado and other states have issued orders that block the administration from relying on the law – at least in the short term – while judges consider a host of lawsuits that have popped up from targeted migrants.
Several courts have also entered more permanent orders against the law’s use, and a Trump-appointed judge in Southern Texas ruled on May 2 that the president had unlawfully invoked the Alien Enemies Act.
Following through on a campaign pledge, Trump invoked the act in mid-March as a way to speed the deportation of alleged members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. Perhaps sensing the imminent litigation, the administration moved quickly to load hundreds of Venezuelans onto planes bound for El Salvador, where they remain today.
After lower courts temporarily blocked the government from carrying out additional deportations, the Trump administration appealed to the Supreme Court in late March, citing “sensitive national-security-related operations” and asking to resume the removals. In a murky, unsigned order on April 7, the Supreme Court technically allowed Trump to continue using the law, and it blocked a legal pathway civil rights groups were attempting to use to challenge Trump’s invocation of the law so they could shut down its use wholesale.
But the court also ruled that migrants subject to deportation under the Alien Enemies Act were entitled to notice and an opportunity to challenge their removal through federal habeas corpus petitions – suits brought by people who claim they are being detained by the government unlawfully – marking a partial win for migrants.
The American Civil Liberties Union, which is representing the migrants, filed a series of habeas lawsuits seeking to protect identified migrants as well as “similarly situated” Venezuelans who could potentially be targeted under the Alien Enemies Act. Several lower courts – including one in New York and another in Texas – issued new temporary orders blocking the administration from deporting people under the act while it considers those cases.
Importantly, those orders only covered the geographic regions over which the specific federal courts had jurisdiction.
In mid-April, immigrant rights groups said a number of Venezuelan detainees in northern Texas not covered by those earlier orders began receiving notices from the government that they were subject to deportation under the act. Some of those immigrants, being held at the Bluebonnet Detention Center in Anson, Texas, were told they might be removed in less than 24 hours.
Those notices “cannot by any stretch be said to comply with this court’s order that notice must be sufficient to permit individuals actually to seek habeas review,” the American Civil Liberties Union said in a brief.
Two immigrants filed a habeas petition in a federal district court in Abilene, Texas, seeking a temporary order blocking their deportation and the removal of “similarly situated” people held at Bluebonnet. Hendrix denied the request for the two migrants, noting the government had “answered unequivocally” that it did not intend to remove them, so they were not at immediate risk of deportation.
The issue of Alien Enemies Act enforcement then returned to the Supreme Court. In an early morning order on April 19, a majority of justices temporarily blocked the Trump administration from deporting any of the Venezuelans in Texas who could potentially be targeted under the act so that it could look more closely at the case.
This story has been updated with additional details.
