Supreme Court Allows US to Deport Venezuelans Under Alien Enemies Act

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

The U.S. Supreme Court in Washington on Aug. 14, 2024. Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times

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 to deport suspected members of a Venezuelan gang but said detainees must be given an opportunity to challenge their removal.

“We grant the application and vacate the [temporary restraining orders],” the court said in a per curiam, or unsigned, opinion, on April 7. The decision applied to two original restraining orders and an extension issued last month by U.S. District Judge James Boasberg.

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 unsigned opinion agreed with the administration’s position that the proper avenue for potential deportees to obtain due process was through habeas corpus, which plaintiffs abandoned early in the case. Habeas refers to a legal process by which individuals can challenge their detention.

The opinion also echoed concerns that D.C. Circuit Judge Justin Walker expressed about the plaintiffs’ potentially bringing the case in the wrong federal district court.

“Detainees are confined in Texas, so venue is improper in the District of Columbia,” the Supreme Court opinion reads. It added that while the individual plaintiffs were entitled to an opportunity to challenge their removal, the proper venue was “the district of confinement,” or where the plaintiffs were confined.

The court stated: “Detainees must receive notice after the date of this order that they are subject to removal under the Act. The notice must be afforded within a reasonable time and in such a manner as will allow them to actually seek habeas relief in the proper venue before such removal occurs.”

Both Sotomayor and Jackson, who issued a separate dissent, argued that the court was acting too quickly and should have considered the issue more carefully.

“The majority flouts well-established limits on its jurisdiction, creates new law on the emergency docket, and elides the serious threat our intervention poses to the lives of individual detainees,” Sotomayor wrote.

The decision came days after the Supreme Court granted the administration’s request to block a lower court order halting its plan to freeze education grants over concerns about diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Quoting Kagan’s dissent in that case, Sotomayor said the court proceeded with “bare-bones briefing, no argument, and scarce time for reflection.”

On social media platform X, Attorney General Pam Bondi celebrated the Supreme Court’s decision, calling it a “landmark victory for the rule of law.”

“An activist judge in Washington, DC does not have the jurisdiction to seize control of President Trump’s authority to conduct foreign policy and keep the American people safe,” she said.

Bondi has since submitted a request to the District Court for the District of Columbia for the case to be dismissed.

On Truth Social, Trump posted: “The Supreme Court has upheld the Rule of Law in our Nation by allowing a President, whoever that may be, to be able to secure our Borders, and protect our families and our Country, itself.”

“A great day for justice in America!” he added in all caps.

The decision came after the administration and the 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 Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which in early April declined to grant that relief.

The plaintiffs, who 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 [Alien Enemies Act], additional individuals are not hurried off to a brutal foreign prison, potentially for the rest of their lives, without judicial process.”