On Thursday, the Supreme Court cleared the way for the Trump administration to deport a group of migrants held for weeks at a military base in Djibouti back to South Sudan.
The unsigned order from the high court followed a June 23 ruling in which a majority of justices permitted the administration to deport certain migrants to countries other than their homeland with minimal notice. That decision sparked a legal dispute over the specific group detained in Djibouti.
A lower court had temporarily blocked their removal, prompting the Trump administration to escalate the case to the Supreme Court. Thursday’s ruling sided with the administration, over the dissent of two liberal justices, allowing officials to proceed with deporting the migrants to South Sudan, CNN reported.
The Supreme Court stated that its earlier decision applied fully to the lower court’s actions. However, a federal judge in Massachusetts ruled that last month’s Supreme Court decision did not apply to eight migrants held in Djibouti because their court-ordered process stemmed from a separate ruling that the administration never appealed.
The migrants, including individuals from Cuba, Vietnam, and Laos, were being held in a converted Conex shipping container. They were diverted to Djibouti while en route to South Sudan. The lower court’s order involving the migrants in Djibouti “cannot now be used to enforce an injunction that” the Supreme Court later paused, the majority said on Thursday.
“Such a remedy would serve to ‘coerce’ the government into ‘compliance’ and would be unenforceable given our stay of the underlying injunction,” the court wrote. Justice Elena Kagan, part of the court’s liberal wing, supported the decision and wrote a brief concurring opinion.
She noted that she had previously disagreed with the Supreme Court’s original ruling permitting third-country removals to proceed. “But a majority of this court saw things differently, and I do not see how a district court can compel compliance with an order that this court has stayed,” she wrote, per CNN.
