WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Friday told conservative judges in Texas they must offer a hearing to detained Venezuelans whom the Trump administration wants to send to a prison in El Salvador.
The justices, over two dissents, rebuked Texas judges and Trump administration lawyers for moving quickly on a weekend in mid-April to put these men on planes.
That led to a post-midnight order from the high court that told the administration it may “not remove any member of the putative class of detainees.” The administration had argued it had the authority to deport the men as “alien enemies” under a wartime law adopted in 1798.
On Friday, the court issued an unusual eight-page order to explain their earlier decision. In doing so, the justices faulted a federal judge in Lubbock, Texas, and the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for taking no action to protect the due process rights of the detained men.
The ruling noted that the government “may remove the named plaintiffs or putative class members under other lawful authorities.”
The order carries a clear message that the justices are troubled by the Trump administration’s pressure to fast-track deportations and by the unwillingness of some judges to protect the rights to due process of law.
After the ruling was issued, President Trump wrote on Truth Social on Friday: “THE SUPREME COURT WON’T ALLOW US TO GET CRIMINALS OUT OF OUR COUNTRY.” He added in a second post: “This decision will let more CRIMINALS pour into our Country, doing great harm to our cherished American public.”
Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project and lead counsel, said in a statement: “The court’s decision to stay removals is a powerful rebuke to the government’s attempt to hurry people away to a Gulag-type prison in El Salvador. The use of a wartime authority during peacetime, without even affording due process, raises issues of profound importance.”
On a Saturday in mid-March, Trump’s immigration officials sent three planeloads of detainees from Texas to the maximum-security prison in El Salvador before a federal judge in Washington could intervene. The prisoners included Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man who had an immigration order that was supposed to protect him from being sent back to his native El Salvador.
Afterward, Trump officials said the detained men, including Abrego Garcia, could not be returned to this country. They did so even though the Supreme Court had said they had a duty to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return.
The same scenario was nearly repeated in mid-April, but from a different prison in Texas.
ACLU lawyers rushed to file an emergency appeal with U.S. District Judge James Hendrix. They said some of the detained men were on buses headed for the airport. They argued they deserved a hearing because many of them said they were not members of a crime gang.
The judge denied the appeals for all but two of the detained men.
The 5th Circuit upheld the judge’s lack of action and blamed the detainees, saying they gave the judge “only 42 minutes to act.”
The Supreme Court disagreed with both on Friday and overturned a decision of the 5th Circuit.
“A district court’s inaction in the face of extreme urgency and a high risk of ‘serious, perhaps irreparable’ consequences” left the detained men with no options, the court said. “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 justices wrote.
“The 5th Amendment entitles aliens to due process of law in the context of removal proceedings. Procedural due process rules are meant to protect” against “the mistaken or unjustified deprivation of life, liberty, or property,” the majority said. “We have long held that no person shall be removed from the United States without opportunity, at some time, to be heard.”
Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Clarence Thomas dissented last month, and they did the same on Friday.
Friday’s ruling doesn’t affect the status of the men who were already sent to El Salvador.
