SCOTUS rules against Alien Enemies deportations
SCOTUS ruled yesterday:
Trump tried to address the problem as to a particularly vicious gang, Tren de Aragua (TdA), by invoking the Alien Enemies Act (AEA), which allows summary removal. That effort has been stymied by multiple courts, incuding the Supreme Court, ruling that persons subject to removal under the AEA are entitled to due process before removal. Depending what the due process looks like may render deportation efforts futile – you can’t have millions of trials, even if they are truncated proceedings.
Is the Constitution a suicide pact? We’re in the process of finding out.
The Supreme Court ruled [Friday] that the hold it previously put on efforts to remove TdA via the AEA will stay in place. A lot of the Per Curiam Opinon related to jurisdiction, including the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction, to decide these matters.
The bottom line is the Supreme Court put everything on hold, and told the 5th Circuit to figure out what type of due process the TdA members should get. Removal of TdA members through other statutory authority, other than AEA, could continue …
It’s a bit complicated and I think, from what I’ve read online, there’s a fair amount of confusion about what it means. That’s in part because it’s still undetermined what the “due process” would consist of; SCOTUS has for the moment left that question to the lower court. This only applies to the Tren de Aragua members deported under the Alien Enemies Act.
It might be a good idea if Congress were to act on this question to create some expedited process. Then again, SCOTUS might rule it unconstitutional if it lacks what SCOTUS considers due process.
The big issue is that Biden was allowed to open the borders, and the millions who came in that way should be just as easy to deport. Illegal entry shouldn’t be a one-way street.
Give them a four minute hearing in front of a police officer. Tell the judges that if they want more process, they can house these gangbangers in their garage.
until some judge decides no, well the immigration control act, doesn’t apply because reasons, do they think this concession will stop the assault on the Court by progs,
just like they sprung Hamas operative, and British agent Mahdawi, from Vermont prison, as they are pushing to release another Hamas sympathizer Ozturk, from lock
up as well as a third
https://www.firstpost.com/world/us-judge-orders-release-of-indian-scholar-badar-khan-suri-arrested-hamas-links-ties-georgetown-university-13888584.html
Judicial Commissar’s are not going to stop anytime soon. And the Supreme Robes are backing them up.
Souls of reason, knowing all that needs knowing, find governing their own private possession. We’re in for a long dark night.
The Supreme Court sincerely wishes to engage the issue in an oh-so-civilized manner, after the Biden cabal tore up any and every federal immigration statute it pleased, failed to enforce the law as it has existed for decades and lied that it was “doing everything possible” to control the border for four years. Biden was Obama’s revenge on a country that had given him everything he wanted, except for becoming “fundamentally transformed.” That was the insult that Obama could not brook, so he used the mentally challenged and amoral avatar of Biden to finish the job. And Biden accommodated him, understanding that by doing so he was achieving his two most important goals in life: first, becoming President and second (or perhaps first, who knows) enriching himself and his family beyond his wildest dreams. Then came Trump and the posse of normal Americans who came with him, Wyatt Earp-like to return law and order to the country. But four of the Justices–the females (assuming Affirmative Action Jackson has figured out what a woman is)– remain opposed to this necessary cleansing, two of them clearly favoring their racial/ethnic comperes, the other two casting votes that seem to depend on the state of their hormones at any given time. Kavanaugh is still afraid of his shadow after the beating he took in nomination and Roberts…? Who knows what motivates him? Only stalwarts Alito and Thomas seem to understand that it is do-or-die time in America. Fighting a cage death match under Marquis of Queensbury Rules while your opponent is allowed to use knives, clubs and brass knuckles is guaranteed to produce a beating. The question remains whether the country can go the distance.
Mr. Roberts and MS Barrett, will you please do what you are supposed to do. Get a backbone
I wrote this as a follow-up to a comment in the Biden post yesterday, but it seems more appropriate to the subject matter here. Caution: it’s longer even than my usual monographs, because I enjoy tracking down what I can on the internet in a way that would be impossible if I had to find every printed source document.
Comment continued from here:
https://thenewneo.com/2025/05/16/joe-biden-what-were-they-thinking/#comment-2802422
For one measure of “okay for us but not for you” actions, specifically by the judiciary, check the deportations vs. nationwide injunctions of Democrat presidents compared to Trump.
NOTE: in all cases herein, “immigration” means coming to or staying in America contrary to any of the many immigration laws, which is by definition illegal.
I saw this count in another blog’s comments: deportations in the millions for Bush, Clinton, and Obama, with 0 injunctions, in the low hundred-thousands for Trump (probably 47 but not specified) with 30 injunctions (and counting).
Although satisfying emotionally, that seemed a little extreme, so I vetted it myself as much as I could.
The claim (which didn’t mention Biden or Trump 45) appears to come from Alec Lace, who’s tweet was then amplified by Elon Musk, per this Politifact post.
https://www.politifact.com/article/2025/apr/30/trump-immigration-injunctions-deportations/
Politifact says the “roughly 30” number came from Stephen Miller, with immigration cases unspecified.
Source of Politifact’s stats (see also the congress.gov articles below):
And then they Politifacters give their opinions (because what their experts say are facts):
Well, you can decide that for yourself if the challenged norms were “constitutional” or just “the way Democrats want to do things.” Trump, his lawyers, and his voters believe the exact opposite: the norms were unconstitutional usurpations of presidential or legislative power, and Trump is righting the ship before it sinks. “Standing apart from prior administrations” is not per se the wrong thing to do.
****************
So, is Politicfact correct? Mostly so on the numbers. Their opinion is debatable, as usual.
This is the most complete graph of returns I’ve found so far, and it doesn’t cover the new administration figures (it’s only been 4 months!) Mouse over the graph to see actual numbers. I like its use of different types of returns, and then the total of all illegals sent away or going back on their own. It generally supports the deportation numbers claimed, with roughly 3 million for Trump 45.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-deportation-numbers-obama-biden-b2649257.html
Another wordier post for the same data.
https://www.factcheck.org/2024/02/breaking-down-the-immigration-figures/
So far under Trump 47: Actual removals are down from Biden’s, but with many in detention who have not yet been deported.
https://www.axios.com/2025/04/01/immigrant-removals-deportations-trump
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As for the nationwide injunctions, here’s an excellent breakdown of the stats through 2024, especially written for legal beagles, covering all the case subjects and including lots of other data.
https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/R/PDF/R48467/R48467.1.pdf
The numbers under Bush and Obama are too low to be significant even if broken out for immigration alone (immigration funding is counted separately), which supports Politifact’s statements.
The number of immigration cases that Biden “lost” in one term is 8 (with possibly a few more in his final year), and the same for Trump in his first term is 36.
So far in Trump’s second term the number is one for sure (of 17 through March 27), and possibly 19 more.
https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/R/PDF/R48476/R48476.3.pdf
That’s out of 60 nationwide injunctions of any kind (see Politifact above), which is far greater than any other president of either party — 44 total from Clinton through Biden in 16 years, including Bush; 124 total for Trump in 5 years, with 56 being immigration related.
It’s hard to imagine that there are that many de facto “norms” that can be challenged, let alone any true Constitutional precepts!
In every other case (that I know of) where a major “gang”* problem has been exacerbated by legalisms, that country has ended with death squads.
I hope we don’t get there, despite the temptation, because, regardless of original motivation, the squads wind up being used for “private ” vendettas.
*gang = criminal, drug, revolutionary
“Is the Constitution a suicide pact?”
Suicide or homicide; it seems that these “justices” don’t care. They are insulated by their lifetime appointments, wealth and security details.
It looks to me that the Supreme Court decided that TdA get some sort of due process, but they’re unwilling to say what that might mean until a lower court takes a shot at it and the Supreme Court can gauge the public response.
Putting the Court’s collective finger to the wind will surely maintain its prestige!
From the actual decision:
We do not address the underlying merits regarding the legality of removals under the AEA.
—————————–
Good summary:
The Supreme Court hasn’t ruled that the government can use the Alien Enemies Act to deport anyone, and it hasn’t ruled that the government can’t use the Alien Enemies Act for deportations. The entire order is that the government has to tell people that hey, we’re going to deport you as an enemy alien, with enough notice that people have some chance to challenge the government’s designation in case the government has made a mistake. A lower court is now tasked with the duty of figuring out what constitutes sufficient notice.
Read it all here – and the headline is something we should all remember for the next 3 years:
https://chrisbray.substack.com/p/always-go-look-at-the-thing-itself
Thank you, Ben David. Exactly.
@Ben David:the headline is something we should all remember for the next 3 years: always-go-look-at-the-thing-itself
Never too late to start, but we should have been doing this for the last 20 years. The right half of the blogosphere used to be much more focused on doing that, calling attention to the thing itself and not the take or headline, but in the last ten years or so has started to focus on spreading its own takes and headlines.
Even if you’re reading a right-leaning blog, you have to have a habit of clicking through for yourself to the original source to see if the take is accurate.
Good example is back in March when everyone was repeating that Gavin Newsom had publicly opposed trans women in women’s sports on his podcast, but if you clicked through he’d said no such thing. The left of course was spreading the same take, for reasons of their own, because they don’t brook anything but full throated endorsement of trans anything. (What Newsom actually said was that he recognized the unfairness to women of allowing men to compete as women and recognized that the issue was hurting Democrats politically.)
And I know that March was 50 years ago in Internet time, but it’s happening all the time.
With regard to judges, in MT we have had two judges rule against the will of the people:
1.https://www.kpax.com/news/montana-politics/judge-strikes-down-montana-law-banning-gender-transition-treatment-for-minors
2.https://www.ktvh.com/news/montana-politics/district-court-judge-blocks-bill-tying-bathrooms-to-biological-sex
The R party in MT does not have the will to put together a group of attorneys to conest this kind of crap. Every bill regarding charter schools–down until such time as a useless compromise was reached.
Every bill regarding teaching transgender ideology in school–down.
Every bill regarding any attempt to reduce the communist control –down.
Not to mention that 9 of the elected R legislators joined with the Democrats to “compromise” regarding the “will of the people”. The R party in MT is useless!
What I hear most often from the men who joined with the Democrats is something like this: “those gals are so sweet and sincere, they just want whats best for folks”. Those “sweet” gals just ate the R party’s lunch!
Here is a summary of the story. Our legislature meets every odd year and only for three (four) months.
https://mtgop.org/resolution-of-the-montana-republican-party-mtgoprescinding-recognition-of-nine-montana-senators-asrepublicans/
Robert’s SCOTUS seems determined to make the entire USA like “Hotel California” — you can move in (without any checks), but you can never be evicted in your lifetime.
‘everybody’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting, now lazy reporters might have let Newsom slide, on that podcast, considering his track record,
the problem with this stay, is of course the Progs will not take a pause, they will redouble their efforts, when Hillarycare was defeated in 94, the Dems kept building the foundations of what Obamacare did, going back to when Truman’s national health plan,
the Court had to realize that reversing Article 42, if memory serves, was the last firewall to the immigration invasion, and so it goes, at least the clerks had to know,
on a similar note, we saw the progs did not take Hamdi as the final order, they attacked the military commissions, in the next decision, Hamdan, and later Boumedienne, so they will attack the ICA, as surely as night follows day,
Trump needs to deport the “justices” to Gaza.
In 1994 two judges ruled against the California Prop 187 “Save Our State” law that passed with 65%. How’s that worked out?
As a fall-back (and assuming that the aliens in question are here illegally), can’t the US just forget about using the Alien Enemies Act ? Those who asked for asylum would also deserve due process of some kind, but presenting convincing proof of illegal status should not slow things down by much for those who are here without a visa.
Some of the negative rulings are actually solidly based on black letter law. Some of what Trump is trying to do bumps up against established law, and the judges are rightly saying so.
Others rulings, the shaky ones, I suspect, are based in in part on ideology and also in part on fear.
As Glenn Reynolds has pointed out in the past, the judiciary as a thing is a ‘gentry institution’. The educational backgrounds and subculture of most of the lawyers and judges leans toward a genteel internationalism.
A lot of judges who might rule for Trump on the merits of the law are, I suspect, scared of the reactions of their friends, relatives, and loved ones to that. So they try to find middle roads or ways to evade the core issues.
This goes way back. SCOTUS observers used to have a tendency to joke about ‘the Greenhouse Effect’, meaning that Anthony Kennedy, then the SCOTUS main swing vote, tended to be very sensitive to criticism of his decisions by Linda Greenhouse, the legal reporter for the New York Times.
Plus the risk that if the Dems get back in control, they might go after judges who ruled for Trump using impeachment or lawfare.
And too, some judges may be physically scared. Trump was shot, and there was at least one other attempt. People like Comey are sending out 8647 signals. One man was plotting to kill Kavanaugh not long ago. It’s easy to tell a judge to ‘get a backbone’, but it looks different when the bullet has your name on it.
There’s a lot packed into this.
I’m okay with determining that someone being slated for deportation because of being a member of a group designated at terrorists, or enemy aliens, actually IS a member of that group.
It’s the Democrats’ farce of never accepting such judgements once made, and continuing to judge-shop for new ones, that is galling.
OTOH, they are making new Republican voters daily with their goal of saving every violent criminal among the illegal border crossers.
@ HC68 > “It’s easy to tell a judge to ‘get a backbone’, but it looks different when the bullet has your name on it.”
That’s one of the reasons we venerate people like Martin Luther and Sir Thomas More, and even those facing a lesser level of threats (to careers but not to life) such as Jordan Peterson and others.
Not to mention many Christian Saints from Peter onward.
And the Nazi resistance (the real one in 1930s Germany), and dissenters in Communist Russia, and in China, and Christians in Africa and the Middle East, and …
Being afraid of bad press and ostracism from social circles is just pusillanimity.
@AesopFan:we venerate people like Martin Luther and Sir Thomas More
Some of us who are aware of both Luther’s and More’s advocacy for and involvement in persecuting other people for their faith don’t “venerate” them.
You might look up what Luther said should be done with Jews. I won’t quote any of it here, but he had a whole book on it. He also supported the persecution of other Christians such as Mennonites.
As for More, he approved in his writings of the burning of heretics, and as Lord Chancellor was part of the judicial machinery that arrested, tried, and executed them. Though More is not known to have personally killed or tortured anyone, he did imprison some in his house while they were processed through the system, so to speak.
For what it’s worth I don’t think these things take away from their other accomplishments; later generations have filtered away the inconvenient facts and used these men to illustrate principles that they themselves would not only have rejected, but in fact would have (and did) fight against.
For example, More should get some extra credit for standing up to the king, when he knew for a fact what awaited people who did so, having been in charge of the judicial system that carried out those sentences on others. (Not sure what he’d make of the Muslim woman who occupies his office today.)
Some of the people killed with the approval of More or Luther would have been better candidates for “veneration”.
Niketas, thanks for your post at 8:40 am. Very interesting!
What seems to get lost in this discussion is that immigration judges are administrative judges and DOJ employees. There isn’t much due process since it is just about determining if someone should be deported. And there are no juries, just a judge. AG or POTUS rightfully can overrule them.
I watched a good “man in the street” interview on immigration, and the fact the Biden administration claimed they needed a new law to deal with the issue but then Trump did so without any new law. The interviewer was doing it in what appeared to be a liberal beachside area, it looked like SoCal.
The pro-Trump side has a clear view. The Democrat side was confused or claimed to be confused and rejected any data offered. A lot of mental gymnastics from the left on this.
This may sound odd, but what rights do illegal aliens actually have? Any rights that they do have is through the largesse of the People of the United States. Shouldn’t the rights of Americans trump those of illegal aliens? I know that it’s way more complicated than that, but the question remains. What rights do illegal aliens have?
JFM, with respect to criminal charges they will have the same rights as US citizens. However, with respect to immigration proceedings they don’t have much in the way of rights, they don’t get a jury trial and the judges are not part of the judicial branch but DOJ administrative judges.
I note that in every other aspect of governance except immigration, the Democrats are more than happy to accept the judgements of administrative courts, who are the creatures of the bureaucracy (as is the DOJ), not the judicial system.
Funny, that.
@ Niketas – I am quite aware of the negative sides of Luther and More, which is why I said “one of the reasons” we venerate them (possibly the only one!) is their courage in the face of possible (Luther) and certain (More) death. In fact, Luther barely escaped execution, thanks to the shelter of one of the German princes of the day.
I don’t think their other ideological and political positions find much positive resonance today, although there are some Democrats and Leftists that might applaud a few of them, de facto if not de jure.
And I fully agree that “Some of the people killed with the approval of More or Luther would have been better candidates for “veneration”. -”
Mine was a single-issue example, familiar to many people from the “filtered” version, as are most historical vitae and events.
PS I confess to being somewhat biased toward the filtered version, as I worked tech for a college production of “A Man for All Seasons” in which AesopSpouse-to-be played Sir Thomas.
It’s a vary narrow slice of More’s life, but a magnificent play.
@AesopFan:It’s a vary narrow slice of More’s life, but a magnificent play.
I agree that it is a delightful and inspiring narrative. But it’s not the real More, is all.
AesopFan,
With respect to “Maryland Man”, the Dems want to accept the decision of the 3rd immigration court, and ignore the first two. They don’t even care what the 3rd court ruled (that he can’t be sent to Guatemala).
They are just in opposition to Trump, because he’s blocking their power play.
“Being afraid of bad press and ostracism from social circles is just pusillanimity.” — AesopFan
Perhaps so, but if so it makes the majority of the human race pusillanimous.
People care what their spouses, relatives, friends, and neighbors think. It’s basic human nature, we’re _tribal_ . It’s hardwired into us, though to varying degrees. There are people who would face down a painful death without flinching for a cause they believe in, but who would back down to that kind of disapproval from friends and loved ones.
There are people who have committed suicide rather than face social rejection.
Plus the possibility, or fear, that crossing the Establishment might bring negative consequences not just to them but to their families as well.