Trump Says It’s ‘Not Possible’ to Give Every Deportee a Trial

The president says he is being ’stymied at every turn' by the courts, including the Supreme Court, on his use of the Alien Enemies Act.

President Donald Trump speaks to reporters aboard Air Force One during the flight from Palm Beach to Joint Base Andrews, as he returns to the White House on April 13, 2025. Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

President Donald Trump on April 21 said that the U.S. government cannot provide a trial to every individual who is slated to be deported, responding to a recent Supreme Court ruling that temporarily barred the government from conducting removals of illegal immigrants under the Alien Enemies Act.

This was Trump’s first public comment on the issue since the Supreme Court on Saturday morning barred Trump from directing immigration officials to conduct more flights of illegal immigrants identified as gang members to a Salvadoran prison.

In a post on social media, Trump said that he was being “stymied at every turn” by the courts, including the Supreme Court, on his use of the Alien Enemies Act. A federal judge in Washington initially blocked his use of the 1798 law.

“I’m doing what I was elected to do, remove criminals from our Country, but the Courts don’t seem to want me to do that,” the president wrote in the post. “My team is fantastic, doing an incredible job, however, they are being stymied at every turn by even the U.S. Supreme Court, which I have such great respect for, but which seemingly doesn’t want me to send violent criminals and terrorists back to Venezuela, or any other Country, for that matter.”

If the government provided all illegal immigrants with a trial, Trump wrote, it would mean that there would need to be “hundreds of thousands of trials for the hundreds of thousands of Illegals we are sending out of the Country,” which is “not possible to do.”

Trump said the courts are being influenced and “intimidated by the Radical Left” and that “if we don’t get these criminals out of our Country, we are not going to have a Country any longer,” referring to criminal illegal immigrants.

Trump’s social media comment appeared to contain a response to critics who said his administration did not follow due process when deporting certain individuals. In one case that has drawn media attention, multiple Democratic lawmakers have traveled to El Salvador to seek the return of deported Salvadoran national Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

Federal officials and an immigration judge have said that Abrego Garcia is an illegal immigrant and likely a member of the MS-13 gang, which was designated as a terrorist group by the Trump administration earlier this year.

Abrego Garcia was also suspected to have been involved in human trafficking in 2022, Homeland Security said in a report this past week. He was deported to El Salvador in March, despite a court order barring his deportation.

In the Supreme Court order, the justices other than Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas wrote that the  “government is directed not to remove any member of the putative class of detainees from the United States until further order of this court.” Alito wrote a dissent criticizing the way the court issued the order, calling it ”unprecedented“ and ”legally questionable.”

The high court acted in an emergency appeal from the American Civil Liberties Union, which argued that immigration authorities appeared to be restarting removals under the Alien Enemies Act.

Earlier in April, the high court ruled that deportations could proceed only if those about to be removed had a chance to argue their case in court and were given “a reasonable time” to contest their pending removals.

On April 19, lawyers for the Trump administration filed court papers opposing the high court’s ruling, saying, in part, that the government did provide advance notice to detainees before the removals.

“Detainees receiving such notices have had adequate time to file habeas claims—indeed, the putative class representatives and others have filed such claims,” Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.