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Supreme Court allows Trump to deport Venezuelans under wartime law
Law & Court News |
2025/04/08 10:02
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The Supreme Court on Monday allowed the Trump administration to use an 18th century wartime law to deport Venezuelan migrants, but said they must get a court hearing before they are taken from the United States.
In a bitterly divided decision, the court said the administration must give Venezuelans who it claims are gang members “reasonable time” to go to court.
But the conservative majority said the legal challenges must take place in Texas, instead of a Washington courtroom.
The court’s action appears to bar the administration from immediately resuming the flights that last month carried hundreds of migrants to a notorious prison in El Salvador. The flights came soon after President Donald Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act for the first time since World War II to justify the deportations under a presidential proclamation calling the Tren de Aragua gang an invading force.
The majority said nothing about those flights, which took off without providing the hearing the justices now say is necessary.
In dissent, the three liberal justices said the administration has sought to avoid judicial review in this case and the court “now rewards the government for its behavior.” Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined portions of the dissent.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor said it would be harder for people to challenge deportations individually, wherever they are being held, and noted that the administration has also said in another case before the court that it’s unable to return people who have been deported to the El Salvador prison by mistake.
“We, as a Nation and a court of law, should be better than this,” she wrote.
The justices acted on the administration’s emergency appeal after the federal appeals court in Washington left in place an order temporarily prohibiting deportations of the migrants accused of being gang members under the rarely used Alien Enemies Act.
“For all the rhetoric of the dissents,” the court wrote in an unsigned opinion, the high court order confirms “that the detainees subject to removal orders under the AEA are entitled to notice and an opportunity to challenge their removal.”
The case has become a flashpoint amid escalating tension between the White House and the federal courts. It’s the second time in less than a week that a majority of conservative justices has handed Trump at least a partial victory in an emergency appeal after lower courts had blocked parts of his agenda.
Several other cases are pending, including over Trump’s plan to deny citizenship to U.S.-born children of parents who are in the country illegally.
Trump praised the court for its action Monday.
“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. A GREAT DAY FOR JUSTICE IN AMERICA!” Trump wrote on his Truth Social site.
Attorneys from the American Civil Liberties Union filed the lawsuit on behalf of five Venezuelan noncitizens who were being held in Texas, hours after the proclamation was made public and as immigration authorities were shepherding hundreds of migrants to waiting airplanes.
ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt said the “critical point” of the high court’s ruling was that people must be allowed due process to challenge their removal. “That is an important victory,” he said.
Boasberg imposed a temporary halt on deportations and also ordered planeloads of Venezuelan immigrants to return to the U.S. That did not happen. The judge held a hearing last week over whether the government defied his order to turn the planes around. The administration has invoked a “ state secrets privilege ” and refused to give Boasberg any additional information about the deportations.
Trump and his allies have called for impeaching Boasberg. In a rare statement, Chief Justice John Roberts said “impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision.”
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Hungary welcomes Netanyahu and announces it’s quitting top war crimes court
Law & Court News |
2025/04/04 10:55
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Hungary will start the process to withdraw from the International Criminal Court, an official said Thursday, just as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrived to red carpet treatment in the country’s capital despite an arrest warrant from the world’s only permanent global tribunal for war crimes and genocide.
Prime Minister Viktor Orbán gave the Israeli leader a welcome with full military honors in Budapest’s Castle District. The two close allies stood side by side as a military band played and an elaborate procession of soldiers on horseback and carrying swords and bayoneted rifles marched by.
As the ceremony unfolded, Orbán’s chief of staff, Gergely Gulyás, released a brief statement saying that “the government will initiate the withdrawal procedure” for leaving the court, which could take a year or more to complete. Netanyahu’s visit to Hungary, which is scheduled to last until Sunday, was only his second foreign trip since the ICC issued the warrant against him in November.
The ICC, based in The Hague, Netherlands, said when issuing its warrant that there was reason to believe Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant had committed crimes against humanity in connection with the war in Gaza.
The war began when Hamas-led militants attacked southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking 251 hostages, most of whom have since been released in ceasefire agreements and other deals. Israel rescued eight living hostages and has recovered dozens of bodies.
Israel’s offensive has killed more than 50,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which doesn’t say whether those killed are civilians or combatants. Israel says it has killed around 20,000 militants, without providing evidence. Israeli military’s response resumed last month, shattering a ceasefire.
After the ICC issued the warrant, Orbán invited Netanyahu to Budapest, and accused the court of “interfering in an ongoing conflict for political purposes.” That invitation was in open defiance of the court’s ruling and contradicted Hungary’s obligations as a signatory to arrest any suspects facing a warrant if they set foot on their soil.
All countries in the 27-member European Union, including Hungary, are signatories, but the court relies on member countries to enforce its rulings. Hungary joined the court in 2001 during Orbán’s first term as prime minister.
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US immigration officials look to expand social media data collection
Top Court Watch |
2025/03/31 08:47
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U.S. immigration officials are asking the public and federal agencies to comment on a proposal to collect social media handles from people applying for benefits such as green cards or citizenship, to comply with an executive order from President Donald Trump.
The March 5 notice raised alarms from immigration and free speech advocates because it appears to expand the government’s reach in social media surveillance to people already vetted and in the U.S. legally, such as asylum seekers, green card and citizenship applicants -- and not just those applying to enter the country. That said, social media monitoring by immigration officials has been a practice for over a decade, since at least the second Obama administration and ramping up under Trump’s first term.
The Department of Homeland Security issued a 60-day notice asking for public commentary on its plan to comply with Trump’s executive order titled “Protecting the United States from Foreign Terrorists and Other National Security and Public Safety Threats.” The plan calls for “uniform vetting standards” and screening people for grounds of inadmissibility to the U.S., as well as identify verification and “national security screening.” It seeks to collect social media handles and the names of platforms, although not passwords.
The policy seeks to require people to share their social media handles when applying for U.S. citizenship, green card, asylum and other immigration benefits. The proposal is open to feedback from the public until May 5.
“The basic requirements that are in place right now is that people who are applying for immigrant and non-immigrant visas have to provide their social media handles,” said Rachel Levinson-Waldman, managing director of the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program at New York University. “Where I could see this impacting is someone who came into the country before visa-related social media handle collection started, so they wouldn’t have provided it before and now they’re being required to. Or maybe they did before, but their social media use has changed.”
“This fairly widely expanded policy to collect them for everyone applying for any kind of immigration benefit, including people who have already been vetted quite extensively,” she added.
What this points to — along with other signals the administration is sending such as detaining people and revoking student visas for participating in campus protests that the government deems antisemitic and sympathetic to the militant Palestinian group Hamas — Levinson-Waldman added, is the increased use of social media to “make these very high-stakes determinations about people.”
In a statement, a spokesperson for the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service said the agency seeks to “strengthen fraud detection, prevent identity theft, and support the enforcement of rigorous screening and vetting measures to the fullest extent possible.”
“These efforts ensure that those seeking immigration benefits to live and work in the United States do not threaten public safety, undermine national security, or promote harmful anti-American ideologies,” the statement continued. USCIS estimates that the proposed policy change will affect about 3.6 million people.
How are social media accounts used now?
The U.S. government began ramping up the use of social media for immigration vetting in 2014 under then-President Barack Obama, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. In late 2015, the Department of Homeland Security began both “manual and automatic screening of the social media accounts of a limited number of individuals applying to travel to the United States, through various non-public pilot programs,” the nonpartisan law and policy institute explains on its website.
In May 2017, the U.S. Department of State issued an emergency notice to increase the screening of visa applicants. Brennan, along with other civil and human rights groups, opposed the move, arguing that it is “excessively burdensome and vague, is apt to chill speech, is discriminatory against Muslims, and has no security benefit.”
Two years later, the State Department began collecting social media handles from “nearly all foreigners” applying for visas to travel to the U.S. — about 15 million people a year.
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Appeals court rules Trump can fire board members of independent labor agencies
Attorney Blog News |
2025/03/28 15:46
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An appeals court ruled Friday that President Donald Trump can fire two board members of independent agencies handling labor issues from their respective posts in the federal government.
A divided three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit agreed to lift orders blocking the Trump administration from removing Merit Systems Protection Board member Cathy Harris and National Labor Relations Board member Gwynne Wilcox.
On March 4, U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras ruled that Trump illegally tried to fire Harris. Two days later, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell ruled that Trump did not have the authority to remove Wilcox.
The Justice Department asked the appellate court to suspend those orders while they appeal the decisions.
President Joe Biden nominated Harris to the MSPB in 2021 and nominated Wilcox to a second five-year term as an NLRB member in 2023.
Circuit Judge Justin Walker, a Trump nominee, said the administration likely will succeed in showing that the statutory removal protections for NLRB and MSPB members are unconstitutional.
“The Government has also shown that it will suffer irreparable harm each day the President is deprived of the ability to control the executive branch,” Walker wrote.
Judge Karen LeCraft Henderson, who was nominated by Republican President George H.W. Bush, wrote an opinion concurring with Walker. Henderson said she agrees with Walker on many of the “general principles” about the contours of presidential power under the Constitution.
Judge Patricia Millett, who was nominated by Democratic President Barack Obama, wrote a dissenting opinion. She said her two colleagues on the case “rewrite controlling Supreme Court precedent and ignore binding rulings of this court, all in favor of putting this court in direct conflict with at least two other circuits.”
“The stay decision also marks the first time in history that a court of appeals, or the Supreme Court, has licensed the termination of members of multimember adjudicatory boards statutorily protected by the very type of removal restriction the Supreme Court has twice unanimously upheld,” Millett wrote.
Government lawyers argued that Trump had the authority to remove both board members. In Wilcox’s case, they said Howell’s “unprecedented order works a grave harm to the separation of powers and undermines the President’s ability to exercise his authority under the Constitution.” They also argued that MSPB members like Harris are removable “at will” by the president.
Wilcox’s attorneys said Trump couldn’t fire her without notice, a hearing or identifying any “neglect of duty or malfeasance in office” on her part. They argued that the administration’s “only path to victory” is to persuade the U.S. Supreme Court to “adopt a more expansive view of presidential power.”
Harris’ attorneys claimed the administration was asking the appeals court to ignore Supreme Court precedent.
“Make no mistake: The government’s radical theory would upend the law,” they wrote. “It would jeopardize not only this board, but also the Federal Reserve Board and other critical entities, like the Securities and Exchange Commission.”
The five-member NLRB lacked a quorum after Wilcox’s removal. The three-member MSPB enforces civil rights law in the workplace.
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Trump asks supreme court to halt ruling ordering the rehiring of federal workers
Top Court Watch |
2025/03/25 05:57
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The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Monday to halt a ruling ordering the rehiring of thousands of federal workers let go in mass firings aimed at dramatically downsizing the federal government.
The emergency appeal argues that the judge can’t force the executive branch to rehire more than 16,000 probationary employees. The California-based judge found the firings didn’t follow federal law, and he ordered reinstatement offers be sent as a lawsuit plays out.
The appeal also calls on the conservative-majority court to rein in the growing number of federal judges who have slowed President Donald Trump’s sweeping agenda.
“Only this Court can end the interbranch power grab,” the appeal stated.
The nation’s federal court system has become ground zero for pushback to Trump with the Republican-led Congress largely supportive or silent, and judges have ruled against Trump’s administration more than three dozen times after finding violations of federal law.
The rulings run the gamut from birthright citizenship changes to federal spending to transgender rights.
Trump’s unparalleled flurry of executive orders seems destined for several dates at a Supreme Court that he helped shape with three appointees during his first term, but so far the majority on the nine-member court has taken relatively small steps in two cases that have reached it.
The latest order appealed to the high court was one of two handed down the same day. While acknowledging the president can lay off employees, two judges found separate legal problems with the way the Republican administration’s firings of probationary employees were carried out.
U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco ruled that the terminations were improperly directed by the Office of Personnel Management and its acting director. He ordered rehiring at six agencies: the departments of Veterans Affairs, Agriculture, Defense, Energy, the Interior and the Treasury.
His order came in a lawsuit filed by a coalition of labor unions and nonprofit organizations that argued they’d be affected by the reduced manpower.
Alsup, who was appointed by Democratic President Bill Clinton, expressed frustration with what he called the government’s attempt to sidestep laws and regulations by firing probationary workers with fewer legal protections.
He said he was appalled that employees were told they were being fired for poor performance despite receiving glowing evaluations just months earlier.
Attorney Norm Eisen, one of the attorneys representing the plaintiffs, vowed to defend the order. “Our coalition remains committed to ensuring that justice prevails for every affected probationary worker,” he said.
The federal government, on the other hand, said the sweeping order requiring the employees to be rehired goes beyond the judge’s legal authority. The plaintiffs never had legal standing to sue and did not prove that the Office of Personnel Management wrongly directed the firings, the Justice Department argued on appeal.
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