The Supreme Court’s ruling allowing the Trump administration to deport 532,000 undocumented migrants prompted a fiery takedown from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
The highest court’s new ruling allows the government to revoke the temporary legal status for half a million migrants from Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Haiti granted by former President Joe Biden’s administration.
The emergency order was unsigned and did not include an explanation for the decision. But it did include a scathing dissent from liberal Justice Jackson, which Justice Sonia Sotomayor signed on to.
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Jackson argued that the court had “plainly botched” the ruling because the government had failed to show that denying the emergency injunction request would cause “irreparable harm.”
She claimed that the court’s ruling reflects a belief “that it is in the public’s interest to have the lives of half a million migrants unravel all around us before the courts decide their legal claims.”
The decision gives migrants the “unbearable” choice between leaving the United States of their own volition or risking deportation by staying, Jackson wrote.
In a scathing last line, Jackson concluded that the court had allowed Trump’s government “to do what it wants to do regardless, rendering constraints of law irrelevant and unleashing devastation in the process.”
The court’s third liberal justice, Elena Kagan, was not listed among those who dissented, and a spokesperson for the Supreme Court declined to comment on the matter when reached by the Daily Beast.
The Department of Homeland Security touted the Supreme Court’s decision in a statement to the Daily Beast, calling it a “victory for the American people.”
“The Biden Administration lied to America,” said spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin. She criticized the previous administration for allowing migrants “opportunities to compete for American jobs and undercut American workers.”
A Massachusetts district court had ruled against the government, deciding that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was not allowed to revoke the temporary status for the entire group of migrants.
In the application to the Supreme Court, D. John Sauer, Trump’s solicitor general, argued that the lower court’s ruling instituted a “de facto permanent injunction” against the government by requiring it to consider migrants’ status case by case.
Sauer claimed that the government would suffer harm if the application were not granted because the decision would “irreparably injure our democratic system” by limiting the president’s power.
Trump and his administration have railed against judges who have blocked his agenda, calling for their impeachment and deeming them “radical left lunatics.”
The Supreme Court has handed the Trump administration both victories and defeats in its efforts to deport large numbers of immigrants. In April, it prevented the administration from using a 200-year-old wartime law as the basis for deportations. This month, however, it allowed the government to deport a group of Venezuelans who had been shielded from removal because of a Biden-era protection.
