The Supreme Court ruled on Monday night that the Trump administration could continue to deport Venezuelan migrants based on 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 is narrow and focused on the proper venue for the cases, rather than on the administration’s use of a centuries-old law to justify its decision to send planeloads of Venezuelans to El Salvador with little to no due process.
The justices did not address the question of whether the Trump administration improperly categorized the Venezuelans as deportable under the Alien Enemies Act, finding the migrants had improperly challenged their deportations in Washington, D.C. The justices determined that the migrants should have raised challenges in Texas, where they were being held.
“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.
In a concurrence, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh stressed that the justices were in agreement that the migrants should receive judicial review, but that they were divided over where the case should be heard.
“As the court stresses, the court’s disagreement with the dissenters is not over whether the detainees receive judicial review of their transfers — all nine members of the court agree that judicial review is available,” Justice Kavanaugh wrote. “The only question is where that judicial review should occur.”
The case is perhaps the most high-profile of the eight 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 of 1798 to deport more than 100 Venezuelans to a prison in El Salvador.
The administration claims the migrants are all members of Tren de Aragua, a violent street gang rooted in Venezuela, and 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, President Trump signed a proclamation that targeted members of Tren de Aragua, claiming that there was an “invasion” and a “predatory incursion” underway as he invoked the wartime law. 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 then 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 Trump 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 that 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 migrants 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.”
