Supreme Court leaves aliens in Salvadoran Prison - J.G.G. v. Trump

The United States Supreme Court in a Per Curiam opinion, over dissents, has vacated the TO issued by Chief Judge James Boasberg barring the transportation and detention in a Slavaforan prison of alleged members of a Venexuelan gang, asserted to to be agents o that government. 

 

Against the backdrop of the U. S. Government’s unprecedented deportation of dozens of immigrants to a foreign prison without due process, a majority of this Court sees fit to vacate the District Court’s order. The reason, apparently, is that the majority thinks plaintiffs’ claims should have been styled as habeas actions and filed in the districts of their detention. In reaching that result, the majority flouts well-established limits on its jurisdiction, creates new law on the emergency docket, and elides the serious threat our intervention poses to the lives of individual detainees.

Sonia Sotomayor, dissenting in Trump v. J.G.G.  [April 7, 2025]

By Steve Vladeck:

Re: Trump v. J.G.G.

https://substack.com/home/post/p-160824388?source=queue

I’ve always thought the real takeaways are to be had from the patterns of the Court’s decisions, not any one ruling.

But the more I read the Court’s Monday night ruling in Trump v. J.G.G., in which a 5-4 majority vacated a pair of temporary restraining orders entered by Chief Judge Boasberg in the Alien Enemy Act case, the more I think that this ruling really is a harbinger, and a profoundly alarming one, at that. To be clear, it’s not a sweeping win for the Trump administration; the Court did not suggest that what Trump is doing is legal, or, just as bad, that it might not be subject to judicial review. Indeed, the Court went out of its way to emphasize that individuals detained under the Act are entitled to due process, including meaningful judicial review.

But much like last Friday’s ruling in the Department of Education grants case, it’s still a ruling by a Court that seems willing to hide behind less-than-obvious legal artifices to make it harder for federal courts to actually restrain conduct by the current administration that everyone believes to be unlawful. As in that decision, here, a 5-4 majority has made it much harder for litigants to bring systemic challenges to what the Trump administration is doing. And especially in the broader context in which the Alien Enemy Act litigation, specifically, has unfolded, the justices in the majority got there b