CNN
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President Donald Trump asked the Supreme Court on Tuesday to make it easier for his administration to deport people to South Sudan and other countries that are not their homeland, the latest in a series of controversial immigration policies the administration has put before the conservative-majority high court.
The issue involves a policy the administration adopted soon after returning to power, which allows the Department of Homeland Security to deport immigrants to nations other than their home country or one where they have legal status – without first notifying them or giving them a chance to claim they risk persecution, torture, or death in that third-party country.
The appeal arrived at the Supreme Court days after the policy drew significant attention when the administration attempted to transfer detainees to war-torn South Sudan without a meaningful opportunity to contest their removal to a place where they might face torture.
“The United States is facing a crisis of illegal immigration, in no small part because many aliens most deserving of removal are often the hardest to remove,” the Department of Justice told the Supreme Court.
After a group of migrants facing deportation sued, US District Judge Brian Murphy, a Biden appointee, in March blocked the administration from deporting migrants to countries other than their own without offering written notice and giving the targeted immigrant a chance to demonstrate they have a credible fear of persecution or torture in that other country.
Murphy later said that the Trump administration “unquestionably” violated his court order when it tried to transfer detainees to South Sudan.
“It was impossible for these people to have a meaningful opportunity to object to their transfer to South Sudan,” Murphy said, citing the truncated timeline and the fact that much of what occurred happened after business hours, when the detainees couldn’t reach lawyers or their families.
Murphy clarified a preliminary injunction he previously issued, imposing additional requirements. Murphy said in a two-page order on May 21 that officials must give the migrants the administration attempted to transfer to South Sudan “no fewer than 72-hours’ notice of the scheduled time” of an interview in which they could claim they had a fear of being sent to a third country. Migrants who are not found to have a “reasonable fear” would then get 15 days to try to reopen their immigration cases so they can challenge their removal to a third country, the judge said in his order.
The Trump administration said Murphy’s handling of those migrants underscored why it needs emergency relief from the Supreme Court.
“Last week, the district court required the government to halt the ongoing third-country removal of the aforementioned criminal aliens to South Sudan,” the administration told the Supreme Court. “As a result, the United States has been put to the intolerable choice of holding these aliens for additional proceedings at a military facility on foreign soil—where each day of their continued confinement risks grave harm to American foreign policy—or bringing these convicted criminals back to America.”
The Trump administration has argued those requirements are not included in the law, and officials said they already have procedures in place to ensure that migrants are not persecuted in a third country. At the first step, those procedures involve seeking diplomatic assurances from the country that people removed from the United States will not be tortured.
Earlier this month, the Boston-based 1st US Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the government’s request to pause Murphy’s ruling – a decision that landed amid growing alarm over reported plans to send migrants to Libya, a country widely criticized for mistreatment of detainees and ongoing civil unrest.
The appeals court raised several “concerns” about allowing the Trump administration to restart the policy, among them “the irreparable harm that will result from wrongful removals in this context.”
In May, Murphy stated that reported plans to deport individuals to Libya or Saudi Arabia would clearly violate his order. Immigrant advocacy groups filed an emergency motion after a Trump official told CNN that a group of undocumented migrants would be flown to Libya aboard a US military plane.
The Libyan Ministry of Foreign Affairs told CNN it “categorically denied any agreement or coordination with U.S. authorities regarding the deportation of migrants to Libya.”
This story has been updated with additional details.
