Updated April 07, 2025 at 22:12 PM ET
The U.S. Supreme Court delivered a major victory to President Trump on Monday, allowing the administration to continue deporting what it says are Venezuelan gang members. The vote was 5-to-4, with conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett joining the three liberals in dissent.
At issue in the case was the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, a controversial law invoked only three times in U.S. history, always during wartime, which allows for the detention and deportation of foreign nationals from countries actively invading the United States. The Trump administration argued that the law applied to Venezuelan gang members who were deemed to be invading the nation.
In an unsigned opinion Monday night, the court's conservative majority didn't rule on that question. But it gave the Trump administration all it needed to continue with the deportations, with one caveat. It said that from here on in, the alleged gang members need to be given notice of deportation, and the opportunity to contest the deportation.
The court, however, said there is only one way to do that. And that is by challenging their detentions on a case-by-case basis.
The initial lawsuit challenging the order, from the American Civil Liberties Union and Democracy Forward, had sought to block use of the Alien Enemies Act through a "class action," in which a handful of people can sue on behalf of all other similarly situated individuals.
But the court said that the men should have brought their challenges through individual "habeas petitions."
Technically habeas corpus means "produce the body." In practice it means that an imprisoned individual has the right to challenge his detention or deportation, but only for himself, and only, the court said, in the places where deportees were being detained. In this case, the named plaintiffs were being held in Texas, a state, where, as the dissenters observed, judges are not likely to be sympathetic.
The order marks a win for the Trump administration, even if temporary, and it could well be a harbinger of things to come as the administration continues to clash with federal courts and assert the executive's dominance over the other two branches of government.
It's unclear what the order means for people who were already deported to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act, after their lawyers said they did not get enough notice of removal. Justice Kavanaugh penned his own concurring opinion.
"We are disappointed that we will need to start the court process over again in a different venue, but the critical point is that the Court rejected the government's remarkable position that it does not even have to give individuals meaningful advance notice to challenge their removal under the Alien Enemies Act. That is a big victory," the ACLU's Lee Gelernt said in a texted statement.
Jackson warns of emergency docket
Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote the principal dissent.
"Critically, even the majority today agrees and the federal government now admits, that individuals subject to removal under the Alien Enemies Act are entitled" to judicial notice and review before they can be removed," she wrote. And that, she said, "should have been the end of the matter."
Instead, she said the court went further than it had to, granting the government "extraordinary relief," and tossing out the lower court's orders without "regard for the government's attempts to subvert the judicial process throughout this litigation. Because the court should not reward the government's efforts to erode the rule of law with discretionary equitable relief, I respectfully dissent."
And Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in dissent as well to stress that the court is embarking on a pattern of deciding "monumental" issues, without full briefing, argument, and sufficient time to think through consequences. The court's liberal justices had expressed a similar critique about an emergency order in an Education Department case last week.
Jackson noted that the court has on occasion lived to regret decisions that it reached in times of great stress, pointing as an example to the internment of the Japanese in World War II.
"At least when the court went off base in the past, it left a record so posterity could see how it went wrong," she wrote. But "with more and more of our most significant rulings taking place in the shadows or our emergency docket, today's court leaves less and less of a trace. But make no mistake: We are just as wrong now as we have been in the past with similarly devastating consequences. It just seems we are now less willing to face it."
Alien Enemies Act proclamation
The dispute began March 15 when President Trump signed a proclamation ordering the removal of individuals who the administration said were members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. The State Department designated TdA as a Foreign Terrorist Organization on Feb. 6.
Within hours, the administration began filling planes with alleged gang members headed for a prison in El Salvador, where they were detained. Meanwhile, five other alleged gang members, who had not been deported yet, sued in federal court to stop the administration in its tracks.
Almost immediately, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg in Washington, D.C., temporarily halted the deportations and told the administration to bring back the planes that were already en route to El Salvador.
But the administration refused to turn the planes around, claiming that it was not legally required to do so, and refusing to answer many of Boasberg's questions, citing national security grounds as the justification. This despite the fact that Boasberg served for seven years on the super-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court, becoming presiding judge in 2020 and 2021. And from 2020 to 2025, he served as chief judge of the United States Alien Terrorist Removal court.
By granting the stay on Monday, the court also appeared to support Trump's invocation of the controversial Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which had only been used three times in U.S. history before now, and always during a war declared by Congress. The Trump administration claims that while the U.S. is not officially at war with Venezuela, the gang is intertwined with the Venezuelan government, and therefore the gang's presence in the U.S. is an "invasion" for purposes of the Act.
One issue that Boasberg found particularly problematic is that the government held no hearings in which the alleged TdA members could dispute their removal from the country. The judge noted that even when the Alien Enemies Act was used during World War II against Japanese, German, and Italian citizens in the U.S., they were at least given their day in court.
Concerns about due process
In the days since then, the consequences of not providing due process have continued to play out. An ICE official conceded on March 31 that the agency incorrectly deported a Salvadoran man living in Maryland due to an "administrative error."
Nonetheless, Trump and other government officials have called for Boasberg's impeachment, impugning his integrity and contending that he lacked the authority to stop the Trump administration from carrying out its agenda.
Those statements prompted Chief Justice John Roberts to issue a rare statement rebuking Trump, which read: "For more than two centuries it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreements concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose."
Following the chief justice's advice, the administration first asked the federal court of appeals in Washington, D.C., to block Boasberg's order and allow the deportations to continue. By a 2-1 vote, the appellate court refused to do that.
After losing in the appeals court, the Trump administration immediately appealed to the Supreme Court, contending that the president has broad discretionary authority on national security matters, which federal judges should not second-guess. The administration urged the Supreme Court to allow the deportations to resume immediately to ensure the safety of the American people.
The decision is only the latest in a tsunami of cases challenging Trump's executive orders to date. As of March 28, federal district courts had issued 40 orders blocking the Trump administration's agenda, and Trump has not even reached his first 100 days in office. That is nearly three times as many court orders as were issued during the first three years of the Biden administration.
NPR's Jasmine Garsd contributed to this report.
Copyright 2025 NPR
