Legal experts detail ways SCOTUS 'threw' federal judge 'under the bus' in pro-Trump ruling

25 June

Sonia Sotomayor in 2009 (K2 Images/Shutterstock.com)

On Monday, June 23, the U.S. Supreme Court halted a lower federal court ruling that blocked the Trump Administration from deporting people to countries other than their own without 15 days' notice.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in her scathing dissent, wrote, "The government has made clear in word and deed that it feels itself unconstrained by law, free to deport anyone, anywhere without notice or an opportunity be heard." The High Court's two other Democratic appointees, Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined Sotomayor in that dissent.

Sotomayor, in other words, wasn't saying that the federal government cannot deport a native of Venezuela back to Venezuela. But she believes that due process is required, and that deporting a Venezuelan to North Africa, for example, is problematic.

In a conversation published in Q&A form by Slate on June 25, attorneys Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern offer legal analysis of the ruling.

Lithwick noted, "The Supreme Court issued this order because the Trump Administration claimed there was an emergency that had to be resolved right now. And since this is the shadow docket, it was resolved based on squishy factors like 'equity' — who's going to suffer the most harm, and what relief do they deserve? The Court keeps tilting these factors in favor of the Trump Administration. And it did so yet again here. But as Justice Sonia Sotomayor says in her dissent, the Trump Administration has twice violated the lower court's orders in this case. It deported four non-citizens to Guantanamo, then El Salvador, in direct violation of Judge Brian Murphy's temporary restraining order. Then, the government flew six migrants to South Sudan in violation of another injunction."

Lithwick explained why Sotomayor's dissent is important, pointing out that "what Sotomayor is flagging here isn't just that the Trump Administration created a mess then asked the Supreme Court to resolve it."

Stern argued that the High Court's GOP-appointed supermajority "threw Judge Murphy under the bus."

"We were left with the possibility that the Supreme Court might be the one to punish the Trump Administration for flouting lower court orders by, at a bare minimum, refusing to grant it emergency relief," Stern told Lithwick. "That would have been entirely in line with the Court's rules of equity. It would have been especially appropriate in a shadow docket cases where the Court weighs a bunch of squishy factors that should tilt against the government when it breaks the law and flouts court orders."

Read the full Slate article at this link (subscription required).

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