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The Supreme Court ruled on Monday night that the Trump administration could continue to deport Venezuelan migrants using a wartime powers act for now, overturning a lower court that had put a temporary stop to the deportations.
The decision marks a victory for the Trump administration, although the ruling did not address the constitutionality of using the Alien Enemies Act to send the migrants to a prison in El Salvador. The justices instead issued a narrow procedural ruling, saying that the migrants’ lawyers had filed their lawsuit in the wrong court.
The justices said it should have been filed in Texas, where the Venezuelans are being held, rather than a court in Washington.
All nine justices agreed that the Venezuelan migrants detained in the United States must receive advance notice and the opportunity to challenge their deportation before they could be removed, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh wrote in a concurrence.
The split among the court was over where — and how — that should happen.
“The detainees are confined in Texas, so venue is improper in the District of Columbia,” according to the court’s order, which was brief and unsigned, as is typical in such emergency applications.
The justices ordered that the Venezuelan migrants must be told that they were subject to removal under the Alien Enemies Act “within a reasonable time” for them to challenge their removal before they are deported. That finding could impose significant new restrictions on how the Trump administration might attempt to use the act in the future.
President Trump wrote on social media that he viewed the decision as a victory.
“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,” Mr. Trump posted on his Truth Social account. “A GREAT DAY FOR JUSTICE IN AMERICA!”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in dissent that the majority’s legal conclusion was “suspect,” adding that the court had intervened to grant the administration “extraordinary relief” without mentioning “the grave harm” that the migrants would face if they were “erroneously removed to El Salvador.”
“The court should not reward the government’s efforts to erode the rule of law,” Justice Sotomayor wrote.
She was joined in dissent by the court’s two other liberal justices, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined in part.
In a separate dissent, Justice Jackson sharply criticized the court’s decision to act on the emergency docket, where cases are typically heard quickly and without oral argument and full briefing.
“At least when the court went off base in the past, it left a record so posterity could see how it went wrong,” Justice Jackson wrote, citing Korematsu v. United States, a notorious 1944 decision by the court upholding the forcible internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.
“With more and more of our most significant rulings taking place in the shadows of our emergency docket, today’s court leaves less and less of a trace,” Justice Jackson wrote. “But make no mistake: We are just as wrong now as we have been in the past, with similarly devastating consequences.”
Lawyers for the migrants challenging their deportations were “disappointed” that they would “need to start the court process over again” in a different court, but counted the ruling as a win, said Lee Gelernt, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union.
Mr. Gelernt said that “the critical point is that the Supreme Court rejected the government’s position that it does not even have to give individuals meaningful advance notice so they can challenge their removal under the Alien Enemies Act.”
He added, “That is a huge victory.”
The case is perhaps the most high-profile of the nine emergency applications the Trump administration has filed with the Supreme Court so far, and it presents a direct collision between the judicial and executive branches.
The administration had asked the justices to weigh in on its effort to use the Alien Enemies Act, a 1798 law, to deport more than 100 Venezuelans it claims are members of Tren de Aragua, a violent street gang rooted in Venezuela. The administration argues that their removals are allowed under the act, which grants the president authority to detain or deport citizens of enemy nations. The president may invoke the law in times of “declared war” or when a foreign government invades the United States.
On March 14, Mr. Trump signed a proclamation that targeted members of Tren de Aragua, claiming that there was an “invasion” and a “predatory incursion” underway. In the proclamation, Mr. Trump claimed that the gang was “undertaking hostile actions” against the United States “at the direction, clandestine or otherwise” of the Venezuelan government.
Lawyers representing some of those targeted challenged the order in federal court in Washington.
That same day, planeloads of the deportees were sent to El Salvador, which had entered an agreement with the Trump administration to take the Venezuelans and detain them.
A federal judge, James E. Boasberg, directed the administration to stop the flights. He subsequently issued a written order temporarily pausing the administration’s plan while the court case proceeded.
The administration appealed Judge Boasberg’s temporary restraining order, and a divided panel of three appellate court judges in Washington sided with the migrants, keeping the pause in place. One judge wrote that the government’s deportation plan had denied the Venezuelans “even a gossamer thread of due process.”
At that point, the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to weigh in, arguing in its application that the case presented “fundamental questions about who decides how to conduct sensitive national-security-related operations in this country.”
Lawyers for the migrants responded sharply, arguing that the temporary pause by Judge Boasberg was “the only thing” standing in the way of the government sending migrants “to a prison in El Salvador, perhaps never to be seen again, without any kind of procedural protection, much less judicial review.”
The American Civil Liberties Union and Democracy Forward, the groups representing the Venezuelan migrants, said the president had bent the law in an “effort to shoehorn a criminal gang” into the wartime law in a manner that was “completely at odds with the limited delegation of wartime authority Congress chose to give him through the statute.”
Lawyers for the migrants said the deportees sent to El Salvador “have been confined, incommunicado, in one of most brutal prisons in the world, where torture and other human rights abuses are rampant.”
The Trump administration replied on Wednesday in a brief that contended that the government was not denying that the Venezuelan migrants should receive “judicial review.”
“They obviously do,” the acting solicitor general, Sarah M. Harris, wrote.
Rather, the government argued, that “the pressing issues right now are ‘procedural issues’ about where and how detainees should challenge their designations as enemy aliens.” Ms. Harris argued that the migrants should have filed their legal challenge in Texas, where they had been detained before the deportation flights, rather than in Washington.
She asked the justices to lift the temporary block on Mr. Trump’s order, calling the pause “an intolerably long time for a court to block the executive’s conduct of foreign-policy and national-security operations.”
Ms. Harris claimed that the migrants’ lawyers had offered a “sensationalized” narrative.
She added that the government denied that the migrants might face torture in El Salvador, writing that the government’s position is “to abhor torture, not to invite brutalization.”
Alan Feuer contributed reporting.
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