Supreme Court Lets Trump Deport Eight Migrants to South Sudan

The court’s order followed a broader one last month allowing removals to countries with which migrants have no connections.


The United States has held eight migrants at a military base in Djibouti while court cases played out. The federal government sought to deport them to South Sudan.

The Supreme Court on Thursday allowed the government to deport eight men who have spent more than a month held under guard on an American military base on Djibouti to South Sudan, granting a request from the Trump administration. The order allows the government to immediately send the men, who hail from countries around the world, to war-torn South Sudan. Neither the United States nor South Sudan has said what will happen to the men on their arrival. Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.

The court last month paused a trial judge’s ruling that all migrants whom the government seeks to deport to countries other than their own must first be given a chance to show that they would face risk of torture. That order was brief and gave no reasons, which is typical when the justices act on emergency applications. Within hours, lawyers for the eight men returned to the judge, Brian E. Murphy of the U.S. District Court in Boston, asking him to continue blocking the deportations of the group.

Judge Murphy, who was appointed by President Joseph R. Biden Jr., denied the motion as unnecessary. He said he had issued a separate ruling last month, different from the one the Supreme Court had paused, protecting the men in Djibouti from immediate removal. He added that Justice Sonia Sotomayor had made the same point in her dissent from the ruling, which Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson joined. “The district court’s remedial orders are not properly before this court because the government has not appealed them,” she wrote.

In Thursday’s ruling, the majority rejected that distinction, paused both sets of rulings and allowed the deportations to South Sudan. Justice Elena Kagan, who dissented previously, this time issued a concurring opinion. “I do not see how a district court can compel compliance with an order that this court has stayed,” she wrote.

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