The Supreme Court on Monday lifted a pair of orders by a federal judge in Washington, D.C., that had barred the government from removing noncitizens who are designated as members of a Venezuelan gang under a March 15 executive order issued by President Donald Trump
By a vote of 5-4, the justices declined to address the challengers’ contention that they are not covered by the 18th-century law on which Trump relied in issuing the order. Instead, the challengers’ lawsuit must be brought in Texas, where they are being held, rather than in Washington, D.C., the court explained.
The unsigned four-page opinion emphasized that although courts have a limited role in reviewing claims under that law, the plaintiffs and others detained under the law are entitled to “notice and an opportunity to challenge their removal.”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor penned a 17-page dissent joined in full by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson and in part by Justice Amy Coney Barrett. She contended that her colleagues’ “decision to intervene in this litigation is as inexplicable as it is dangerous.”
Jackson wrote her own two-page dissent in which she lamented that the majority’s “fly-by-night approach to the work of the Supreme Court is not only misguided. It is also dangerous.”
The 1798 law at the center of the case is the Alien Enemies Act, which allows the president to detain or deport citizens of an enemy nation without a hearing or any other review by a court if either of two things occurs: Congress declares war, or there is an “invasion” or “predatory incursion.” The law has been invoked only three times – during the War of 1812, World War I, and World War II.
Trump’s executive order focuses on a large Venezuelan gang named Tren de Aragua, which began in Venezuela’s prisons and then spread into other parts of Latin America and, eventually, the United States. In February, Secretary of State Marco Rubio designated it as a “foreign terrorist organization.”
Good luck lodging that challenge from a Salvadoran prison.
We are not at war and none of these countries are our enemies. Nothing matters any more to these right wing pieces of shit on the Supreme Court. They are traitors and should be treated as such.
Because they’re less likely to get a sympathetic judge in Texas.
Just to remind everyone that this is always what the supreme court does.
They pick the most fascist outcome, and then search for any legal argument that will give them the outcome they want.
Innocent until proven guilty – unless you’re carrying cash and/or look foreign. Got it.
