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(CNN) — The Supreme Court on Monday allowed President Donald Trump to enforce the Alien Enemies Act for now, handing the White House a significant victory that will let immigration officials rely on a sweeping wartime authority to rapidly deport alleged gang members.
The unsigned decision in the case, one of the most closely watched emergency appeals pending at the Supreme Court, lets Trump invoke the 1798 law to speed removals while litigation over the act’s use plays out in lower courts. The court stressed that going forward, people who are deported should receive notice they are subject to the act and an opportunity to have their removal reviewed by the federal court where they are being detained.
The court’s three liberal justices dissented from the decision, and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a member of the court’s conservative wing, partially dissented.
Trump praised the decision in a Truth Social post, writing in all-caps that it was “a great day for justice in America.”
”The Supreme Court has upheld the Rule of Law in our Nation by allowing a President, whoever that may be, to be able to secure our Borders, and protect our families and our Country, itself,” he wrote.
Trump administration officials, including Attorney General Pam Bondi and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, quickly applauded the decision, with Bondi describing it as a “landmark victory for the rule of law.”
“An activist judge in Washington, DC does not have the jurisdiction to seize control of President Trump’s authority to conduct foreign policy and keep the American people safe,” the attorney general posted on social media.
“President Trump was proven RIGHT once again!” Noem posted, adding, “LEAVE NOW or we will arrest you, lock you up and deport you.”
Trump framed his emergency appeal as a fight over judicial power and, specifically, US District Judge James Boasberg’s order that temporarily blocked the president from enforcing the Alien Enemies Act against five Venezuelans who sued and a broader class of people who might be affected — in other words, anyone else. By granting the president’s request, the Supreme Court has tossed out Boasberg’s orders.
Critically, the court made clear in its unsigned order that officials must give migrants subject to Trump’s proclamation adequate notice that they are being removed pursuant to the wartime authority so they have “reasonable time” to bring habeas complaints. Those are suits brought by people who claim they are being detained by the government unlawfully.
A key concern among attorneys representing the migrants has been that the government’s rush to remove migrants under the act leaves them with little to no time to file such legal claims.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the court’s most senior liberal, argued the Trump administration’s conduct in the case “poses an extraordinary threat to the rule of law.”
“That a majority of this court now rewards the government for its behavior with discretionary equitable relief is indefensible,” she wrote. “We, as a nation and a court of law, should be better than this.” Barrett, though she did not write separately, joined a key portion of Sotomayor’s dissent questioning whether habeas claims should be the exclusive way for people to challenge their deportations under the act.
The court’s order comes a day before Boasberg was set to hear arguments over whether to indefinitely block Trump’s use of the wartime authority for the deportations. The judge is separately weighing whether “probable cause” exists to hold Trump administration officials in contempt for violating his orders when it allowed deportation flights to continue last month. Trump and other administration officials have repeatedly attacked Boasberg as exceeding his authority, earning the president a rare rebuke from Chief Justice John Roberts.
In her searing dissent, Sotomayor said the compliance issue before Boasberg “should be reason enough to doubt that the government appears before this court with clean hands.”
“That is all the more true because the government has persistently stonewalled the District Court’s efforts to find out whether the government in fact flouted its express order,” she wrote, later adding that the administration’s “conduct in this litigation poses an extraordinary threat to the rule of law.”
In a separate dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson blasted the majority for ruling on the case using the emergency docket, without oral arguments or a more considered briefing. Jackson referenced the 1944 Korematsu case, in which the Supreme Court infamously allowed for the internment of hundreds of thousands of Japanese Americans during World War II.
“I lament that the court appears to have embarked on a new era of procedural variability, and that it has done so in such a casual, inequitable, and, in my view, inappropriate manner,” Jackson wrote.
“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.
Trump’s invocation of the centuries-old law
At issue was Trump’s invocation on March 15 of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which gives a president broad power to target and remove undocumented immigrants in times of war or when an enemy attempts an “invasion or predatory incursion.” Trump has argued the flow of alleged gang members from Venezuela constitutes an invasion.
Soon after Trump invoked the law, officials loaded up three planes with more than 200 Venezuelan nationals and flew them to El Salvador, where they are being housed in a maximum-security mega prison. The administration has since said that some of those people were deported under authorities other than the 18th century act.
The Trump administration has said the men were affiliated with the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.
But there have been growing questions about how those determinations were made. The court was considering the appeal amid revelations the administration mistakenly deported a Maryland father to El Salvador “because of an administrative error.” The deportation of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia took place under a different legal authority — not the Alien Enemies Act — but it underscored the potential risks involved with the rapid deportations.
Earlier Monday, the Supreme Court placed on hold a lower court order requiring the government to return Abrego Garcia to the US by midnight.
Boasberg’s order halting additional removals didn’t block the administration from deporting alleged gang members under other laws, nor did it stop the administration from apprehending immigrants under the act. Trump nevertheless quickly appealed.
The DC Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 on March 26 that Boasberg’s orders could stand while the legal challenge plays out. The majority included one judge nominated by President George H.W. Bush and another by President Barack Obama.
US Circuit Judge Karen Henderson wrote that the term “invasion” was widely understood among the nation’s founders as involving a military invasion.
“The phrase echoes throughout the Constitution ratified by the people just nine years before. And in every instance, it is used in a military sense,” she wrote.
This story has been updated with additional information.
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