Trump administration claims district court defied Supreme Court’s order allowing for immigrants’ deportation 

Less than one day after a majority of the Supreme Court cleared the way for the Trump administration to move forward, at least for now, with deporting immigrants to countries not specifically identified in their removal orders, lawyers for the Trump administration and for immigrants seeking to block their removals sparred in new filings over the fate of a group of immigrants currently being held on a U.S. military base in Djibouti after efforts to remove them to South Sudan were stymied. 

U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer urged the justices to act quickly to correct what he characterized as the district judge’s “unprecedented defiance” of the Supreme Court’s authority, while attorneys for the immigrants countered that “the lives and safety” of the group of immigrants in Djibouti “are at imminent risk.” 

In an order on April 18, U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy had barred the government from deporting immigrants to “third countries” without first taking a series of steps to ensure that the immigrants would not face torture in those countries. In a filing on Tuesday, Sauer contended that when the justices put that order on hold on Monday, they also “effectively stayed” an order that Murphy issued on May 21, when he concluded that the Trump administration had violated his April 18 order by attempting to deport eight men to South Sudan without following proper procedures. (The plane carrying the men eventually landed in nearby Djibouti, where the men remain.) 

Murphy said Monday night that the May 21 order is not affected by the Supreme Court’s decision. Sauer has now asked the justices to “make clear beyond any doubt that the government can immediately proceed with the third-country removals of the criminal aliens from Djibouti.” 

In their own new filing with the Supreme Court, lawyers for the men currently held in Djibouti pushed back, telling the justices that the court’s order on Monday “does not change the fact that” the Trump administration violated Murphy’s April 18 order “by attempting to remove these class members to South Sudan without providing meaningful notice or any opportunity to assert claims for protection under the Convention Against Torture.” Murphy’s May 21 order, they stressed, was simply intended to provide a remedy for that violation, and there is no dispute that the government was required to comply with it. The government should not, the men’s lawyers concluded, “be permitted to evade the ordered remedy simply because” it “delayed compliance.”