The US Supreme Court kept in place its block on President Donald Trump’s deportations of Venezuelan migrants under a 1798 law historically used only in wartime, faulting his administration for seeking to remove them without an adequate legal process.
The justices, in a brief and unsigned opinion, granted a request by American Civil Liberties Union attorneys representing the migrants to maintain the halt on the removals for now.
“Under these circumstances, notice roughly 24 hours before removal, devoid of information about how to exercise due process rights to contest that removal, surely does not pass muster,” the court wrote in its ruling.
Conservative Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas publicly dissented from Friday’s decision. Alito wrote in an opinion that he did not think the Supreme Court had the power to weigh in at this stage of the case and questioned whether providing relief to the detainees as a group was legal.
The court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, ordered the New Orleans-based 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals, which handles cases arising from Texas, to determine the procedures that must be accorded to the migrants “to satisfy the Constitution in this case.”
The Supreme Court, meanwhile, clarified that the administration was free to pursue deportations under other provisions of US immigration law.
The court on April 19 had ordered a temporary stop to the administration’s deportations of dozens of migrants being held at a detention centre in Texas.
Trump criticised the Supreme Court’s action, writing on social media, “This is a bad and dangerous day for America!”
