After the Supreme Court issued an emergency ruling Monday lifting a temporary block on the United States’ deportation of Venezuelan migrants, Trump administration officials were positively giddy.
“SCOTUS confirms our Commander-in-Chief Donald J. Trump has the power to stop the invasion of our country by terrorists using war time powers,” Department of Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem wrote on X.
The only problem with Noem’s post? That’s not what the Supreme Court said.
First, some background: The case before the court concerns the Trump administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act—a 1798 wartime law—to justify deporting Venezuelan migrants who the United States government has accused of being members of the gang Tren de Aragua. This is the law that the U.S. used to fly 238 men, without due process and, in many cases, with slim evidence, to a brutal El Salvadoran prison last month.
Lawyers representing migrants being threatened with removal filed a lawsuit in federal court in Washington, D.C., arguing that Trump unlawfully invoked a wartime law during peacetime in order to expedite mass deportations. A district court judge in that case prohibited the deportation flights from proceeding (though, the administration appears to have ignored the order) and temporarily blocked further deportations under the law, while the court weighed the underlying facts of the case.
The Trump administration appealed that decision all the way up to the Supreme Court, asking the justices to vacate the lower court’s ruling and lift the temporary restraining order. On Monday, in a 5-4 decision, the court did just that.
But it did not, as Noem claimed, weigh in on whether Trump’s use of war time powers to send migrants to El Salvador was lawful. Instead, the decision hinged on something far more clerical: whether the original lawsuit was filed in the proper place.
“The detainees are confined in Texas, so venue is improper in the District of Columbia,” the majority wrote. And yet the court was clear that it was not giving the administration carte blanche to disappear people in the dark of night, without due process. “The detainees subject to removal orders under the [Alien Enemies Act] are entitled to notice and an opportunity to challenge their removal. The only question is which court will resolve that challenge,” the majority decision read.
Lee Gelernt, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union representing the migrants, called that point “a huge victory” in an interview with the New York Times. “The critical point is that the Supreme Court rejected the government’s position that it does not even have to give individuals meaningful advance notice so they can challenge their removal under the Alien Enemies Act,” Gelernt said, though he acknowledged disappointment at having to start proceedings over again in a Texas court.
Of course, the news is still a blow to the migrants and their families, many of whom insist that their loved ones have nothing to do with Tren de Aragua. A recent 60 minutes investigation found that 75% of the 238 men who were deported to El Salvador appear to have no criminal records. And the majority’s opinion does not make it at all clear how those men, who are now outside of the United States’ jurisdiction, ought to go about seeking their freedom.
In a sharp rebuke of the majority, liberal justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the court’s decision to intervene in the case on its emergency docket was “as inexplicable as it is dangerous.” That’s particularly true, she wrote, given that the district court was set to hear briefings in the case on Tuesday.
She also pointed to the court’s other decision this week to pause a court deadline to return Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Venezuelan man who the Trump administration wrongfully deported to El Salvador due to what it said was an “administrative error.” The administration has since argued that it can’t return Abrego Garcia now that he is in Salvadoran custody. “The Government takes the position that, even when it makes a mistake, it cannot retrieve individuals from the Salvadoran prisons to which it has sent them,” Sotomayor wrote. “History is no stranger to such lawless regimes, but this Nation’s system of laws is designed to prevent, not enable, their rise.”
And yet, Sotomayor emphasized that even the majority’s ruling cannot be read as a free pass for the Trump administration to continue with business as usual. “[T]he Government cannot usher any detainees, including plaintiffs, onto planes in a shroud of secrecy, as it did on March 15, 2025,” she wrote, describing the court’s unanimous view. If it does, she warned, “it does so in direct contravention of an edict by the United States Supreme Court.”
Issie Lapowsky
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