The Supreme Court early Saturday paused the deportation of immigrants under the Alien Enemies Act.
This pause froze action in a fast-developing case involving a group of immigrants in Texas who say the Trump administration was working to remove them.
The administration had been deporting Venezuelan immigrants under the Alien Enemies Act, an 18th century wartime authority that allows the president to detain or deport the natives and citizens of an enemy nation.
Trump has argued that the Venezuelans in question are part of a gang that counts as an “enemy nation.” Critics, however, say this law is being misapplied to deport people without due process.
Tara Grove, the Vinson & Elkins chair in law at UT Austin, said we still don’t know much about the people at the center of this lawsuit.
“The government is alleging that they are members of this gang. And they are saying, you can’t deport us under the Alien Enemies Act. That doesn’t apply here,” Grove said. “But this litigation is moving very, very quickly, as I think illustrated by the fact that the Supreme Court issued basically a midnight order in the middle of the night between Friday and Saturday.”
The Supreme Court did not give much in the way of explanation related to this ruling, Grove said, though its brief order drew dissents from conservative Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas.
The court “just said, let’s keep things as they are. Let’s keep these individuals inside the United States until the courts have a chance to rule on whether they can be validly removed pursuant to the Alien Enemies Act,” she said. “I think what underlies this is a concern that the government was going to remove them and might not be able to get them back if a court ordered in their favor later on.”
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Many of the Venezuelan immigrants who have been removed under the Alien Enemies Act have been sent to a prison in El Salvador known as the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT. Grove said it is unclear whether that was the plan for the folks represented in this case, too.
“There’s a lot of procedural stuff going on in these cases. So there are some plaintiffs who are named in the case, but what the ACLU is trying to do is to get all of the individuals involved certified as a class,” she said. “And so what they asked for was an order from the Supreme Court basically halting any kind of removal until all of those issues could get sorted out. And that’s what the Supreme Court granted.”
This ruling comes among other orders from the high court and other federal judges related to immigration and deportation of immigrants to CECOT.
“The Supreme Court told the government in a separate case involving an individual from El Salvador that the government should facilitate his return from El Salvador to the United States,” Grove said. “This is an individual who had an order from an immigration court in 2019 saying that he could not be removed to El Salvador, and according to the government, he was mistakenly removed to El Salvador pursuant to some kind of administrative error. Since the Supreme Court’s order on April 7th, the government has not apparently taken steps to help facilitate Mr. Abrego Garcia’s return to the United States.”
Grove said it is important to keep this wider context in mind.
“I think one has to assume that the Supreme Court this past weekend was concerned because of that other case, that if any of the individuals involved in this case left the United States, there was at least the possibility that the government would claim there was nothing that it could do to bring them back,” she said.
Grove said she expects to see continuing litigation on this issue in the coming weeks and months.
“This is a temporary stay just for now. And then there will be additional litigation in the district court, including on whether the ACLU can actually represent the entire class together,” she said. “So you have a bunch of plaintiffs suing together. That itself involves all sorts of complicated questions, and I think that will be one of the next things that the district court starts to sort out.”
