by Amy Howe at SCOTUSblog
The Supreme Court on Monday allowed the Trump administration, at least for now, to move forward with deporting immigrants to countries not specifically identified in their removal orders. In a brief unsigned order, the justices paused a ruling by a federal judge in Massachusetts that temporarily prohibited the government from sending immigrants to “third-party countries” without first taking a series of steps to ensure that the immigrants would not face torture there.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented, in a lengthy opinion joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “Apparently,” Sotomayor wrote, “the Court finds the idea that thousands will suffer violence in far-flung locales more palatable than the remote possibility that a District Court exceeded its remedial powers when it ordered the Government to provide notice and process to which the plaintiffs are constitutionally and statutorily entitled.”
The dispute stems from guidance issued by the Department of Homeland Security earlier this year, in response to an executive order signed by President Donald Trump that instructed DHS to take “all appropriate actions” to remove noncitizens who are still in the United States even though an immigration judge issued an order for their deportation.
In the first set of guidance, issued in February, DHS instructed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to determine whether immigrants who had been the subject of such orders but had not yet been deported because of the prospect that they would be tortured if they were returned to their home countries could instead be sent to a different country – a process known as a third-country removal.
Then, in March,…
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