The Supreme Court on June 23 temporarily lifted a lower court order blocking the Trump administration from deporting illegal immigrants to so-called third countries to which they have no connection.

The unsigned order came in the case known as Department of Homeland Security v. D.V.D.

Three justices—Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson—dissented.

In an emergency application to the court, the federal government had argued that there is a “crisis of illegal immigration, in no small part because many aliens most deserving of removal are often the hardest to remove.”

The government has tried to speed up the deportation process “by removing aliens to third countries that have agreed to accept them.”

“Convincing third countries to accept some of the most undesirable aliens requires sensitive diplomacy, which involves negotiation and the balancing of other foreign-policy interests,” it stated.

A federal district court issued a preliminary injunction on April 18 preventing the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) “from exercising its undisputed statutory authority to remove an alien to a country not specifically identified in his removal order (i.e., a ‘third country’), unless DHS first satisfies an onerous set of procedures invented by the district court to assess any potential claim under the Convention Against Torture (CAT) … no matter how facially implausible,” the application reads.

The procedures “have usurped the president’s authority over immigration policy,” and “are currently wreaking havoc on the third-country removal process,” the application stated

​​In the days before the application was filed on May 27, the government was taking steps to remove “a group of criminal aliens who had been in the country for years or decades after receiving final orders of removal, despite having committed horrific crimes,” according to the application.

A single federal district court “has stalled these efforts nationwide,” even though the aliens concerned all received “extensive legal process,” including being tried in criminal court and being ruled removable from the United States.

The government filed its application with the Supreme Court in the case, while an appeal of the district court’s ruling is currently pending in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.

The illegal immigrants argued in a June 4 brief filed by the National Immigration Litigation Alliance and other groups that the government’s request to block the district court order should be denied.

The district court’s order “provides a basic measure of fairness to comply with nondiscretionary statutory protections: meaningful notice and an opportunity to be heard.”

The court had “abundant authority to ensure compliance with the law and did so in a measured way,” going to “great lengths” not to micromanage the government’s compliance with the law, the brief said.

Sotomayor filed a dissenting opinion, which Kagan and Jackson joined.

“In matters of life and death, it is best to proceed with caution,” Sotomayor wrote.

The dissenting justices said that the government has wrongfully deported plaintiffs to Guatemala and South Sudan, “a nation the State Department considers too unsafe for all but its most critical personnel.”

Instead of allowing the lower courts to manage this important litigation “with the care and attention it plainly requires,” the Supreme Court is granting the government “emergency relief from an order it has repeatedly defied,” Sotomayor wrote.

“I cannot join so gross an abuse of the Court’s equitable discretion,” she wrote.

Equitable powers are used by courts to ensure fair results in cases in which a rigid application of the law would result in an injustice.

This article by Matthew Vadum appeared June 23, 2025, in The Epoch Times.