Supreme Court Allows Trump Admin to Deport Venezuelan Immigrants Under Wartime Law

An appeals court had rejected Trump’s request to stay Judge James Boasberg’s orders blocking deportations under the Alien Enemies Act.

The Supreme Court granted President Donald Trump’s request to halt a federal judge’s orders preventing his administration from using the Alien Enemies Act (AEA) to deport suspected members of a Venezuelan gang.

“We grant the application and vacate the [temporary restraining orders],” the court said in a per curiam, or unsigned opinion, on April 7.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor penned a dissent that was joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Justice Amy Coney Barrett partially joined Sotomayor’s dissent.

The decision came after the administration and plaintiffs in the initial case filed dueling briefs to the justices.

Acting U.S. Solicitor General Sarah Harris told the Supreme Court that the “case presents fundamental questions about who decides how to conduct sensitive national-security-related operations in this country—the President, through Article II, or the Judiciary, through [temporary restraining orders].”

Trump appealed Boasberg’s orders to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which declined this past week to grant that relief.

The plaintiffs, which included a group of Venezuelan nationals, told the court on April 1 that the district court’s block “ensures that, based on an unprecedented peacetime invocation of the AEA, additional individuals are not hurried off to a brutal foreign prison, potentially for the rest of their lives, without judicial process.”

This is a developing story and will be updated.