On Thursday, July 3, the U.S. Supreme Court examined the case DHS v. D.V.D. and handed down an order favorable to the Trump Administration. At issue was whether or not eight migrant men could be deported to South Sudan for detention even though they weren't from that country — and the High Court ruled that they could.
Slate's Mark Joseph Stern is highly critical of that decision in an article published on July 7, arguing that once again, the Supreme Court's right-wing supermajority is green-lighting the Bush Administration's unconstitutional actions.
"On Thursday afternoon," legal journalist Stern laments, "the Supreme Court issued a brief order condemning eight migrants to banishment in South Sudan, where they face the very real possibility of torture and death. None of the eight men had ever set foot in the war-torn African nation, and they had all been expelled from the United States without due process in direct violation of a lower court order. But SCOTUS didn't care."
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Stern adds, "What mattered to the majority was that Donald Trump's administration wanted to dump them in South Sudan immediately. And nothing — no federal law or treaty or constitutional guarantee — was going to stop it. Not under the watch of this Supreme Court."
According to Stern, the DHS v. D.V.D. decision is consistent with the High Court's willingness to defend the indefensible where the Trump Administration is concerned.
"Thursday's brutal order neatly encapsulates the SCOTUS term that drew to a close less than one week earlier," Stern warns. "Aside from a few sporadic attempts to rein in Trump's most lawless excesses, the Court has largely given up policing the president's power grabs. More frequently, in fact, the conservative supermajority facilitates his abuses of power by expanding executive authority to new heights, sapping strength from Congress and the lower courts in the process. And on the rare occasions when SCOTUS does draw a line, it seems more concerned with preserving its own supremacy than placing meaningful limits on Trump's authoritarian impulses."
Stern notes that the DHS v. D.V.D. order was made on the High Court's shadow docket.
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"In the last few months," the legal journalist observes, "the Court has exploited the shadow docket to greenlight many of Trump's most egregious, legally dubious policies: stripping legal status from more than 500,000 law-abiding immigrants; revoking huge numbers of federal contracts and appropriations; purging tens of thousands of civil servants; firing heads of independent agencies protected from removal by Congress; discharging thousands of transgender service members — the list grows every month."
Stern adds, "Thursday's case, DHS v. D.V.D., revolved around the (Trump) Administration's scheme to banish immigrants to 'third countries' — places they have never been — without any semblance of due process."
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Mark Joseph Stern's full Slate article is available at this link (subscription required).