Trump urges Supreme Court to restart deportations to countries with poor human rights records
By John Fritze, CNN
(CNN) — President Donald Trump’s administration urged the Supreme Court on Thursday to allow it to remove migrants to countries other than their homeland without giving them an opportunity to raise human rights concerns.
The Justice Department filed an emergency appeal after a decision from the Boston-based 1st US Circuit Court of Appeals late Wednesday effectively blocked the removals, which have been taking place since the Supreme Court sided with the administration on the issue more than a year ago.
That decision has “created substantial logistical problems with ongoing removal operations – including the cancellation of flights – and led to added expense, potential diplomatic issues, and the inability to remove dangerous criminals,” US Solicitor General D. John Sauer, the administration’s top appellate attorney told the high court in the new filing.
“While certain aliens may benefit from stalling their removal, the nation does not,” Sauer wrote.
The Supreme Court reviewed the policy at an earlier stage of the case last year and allowed it to continue over the dissent of the court’s three liberal justices – Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
The justices then sided with the administration again in a case involving a specific group of migrants that had been held for several weeks on a military base in Djibouti.
The administration began the policy last year as part of its broader crackdown on immigration. One of the biggest hurdles previous administrations have faced is trying to deport migrants back to their home countries who would refuse to receive them for a host of reasons, including frosty relations with the United States. Trump’s answer to that problem was to deport those migrants to some other country, even if the migrant had no ties to the destination.
The policy drew considerable scrutiny last year after immigrant rights groups revealed that one group of migrants, initially bound for South Sudan, were being detained in Djibouti. The migrants, including some from Cuba, Vietnam and Laos, were held in a converted Conex shipping container. An estimated 25,000 migrants have been removed under the policy.
At issue is the Convention Against Torture, ratified by the Senate in 1994, that generally bars deportation or extradition to countries where there is a possibility that the migrant might be tortured. The law is vague about how an administration is supposed to make that determination and what process rights are due to the migrant at issue.
In its emergency appeal on Thursday, the administration asked for an immediate “administrative” stay that would allow the flights to continue.
The Justice Department told the court in its filing that it had cancelled flights and “has had to pull nearly 150 aliens from removal flights to at least four different countries.”
The high court ordered the immigrant rights groups fighting the administration to respond by Monday afternoon.
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