AILSA CHANG, HOST:
The Supreme Court has, for now, allowed the Trump administration to resume quickly deporting immigrants to countries other than the countries that they are from. It temporarily lifted a block by a federal judge in Boston, who had said migrants needed to be allowed to challenge their expulsion to a so-called third country. We're joined now by NPR's Adrian Florido. Hi, Adrian.
ADRIAN FLORIDO, BYLINE: Hi, Ailsa.
CHANG: Hi. OK, so just catch us up real quick and give us the background on this case.
FLORIDO: Well, earlier this year, the Trump administration was looking for ways to deport immigrants whose home countries would not take them back for whatever reason. And the Department of Homeland Security told its immigration agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement, that it could send these migrants to some other country as long as that country assured the government - the U.S. government that it would not torture or persecute these immigrants.
CHANG: And how did immigrant rights groups respond to that?
FLORIDO: Well, they sued, and a federal judge in Boston issued a temporary block, saying that if the government was going to send someone to a third country, it had to first give them enough notice of where they were going and enough time to express fear that they could be tortured or face other harm once they got there. And if they expressed that fear, the judge said, the government had to give them a chance to make their case. The Trump administration appealed this ruling all the way up to the Supreme Court, though.
CHANG: And what argument did the government make in this case?
FLORIDO: Well, the Trump administration has said that many of those people it seeks to deport to third countries are violent criminals whose home countries, again, will not take them and that it needs to find someplace to send them. The Trump administration has tried at least a couple of times to get around that Boston judge's order. In May, it tried to deport some men to Libya, but it was stopped by the judge. Excuse me. And then a few weeks later, it tried to send another group to South Sudan, and those men never made it because before the plane arrived, the judge in Boston again intervened.
Those men are being held now in Djibouti in East Africa, and they've been there in a sort of limbo ever since. But with today's Supreme Court ruling temporarily lifting the lower court judge's restrictions, the government will be allowed to finally send those men onto South Sudan if it wants to. Today's ruling was unsigned, and it gave no legal reasoning, Ailsa, but the court's three liberal justices dissented.
CHANG: I'm curious, what did those justices say in the dissent?
FLORIDO: Well, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote it, and she was joined by justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Sotomayor wrote that, quote, "in matters of life and death, it is best to proceed with caution," and that in this case, the government took the opposite approach. She wrote that in its rush to deport people to countries like South Sudan, the government was putting these migrants at risk of torture or other dangerous conditions. In the case of South Sudan, for example, it's a country in armed conflict, and the U.S. State Department has itself told Americans not to visit.
CHANG: I am curious, Adrian, if we could just step back, like, what do you think the big picture is in this case? Like, what is it really about, you think?
FLORIDO: Well, like so many of the immigration cases that are being litigated in federal courts right now, this is a case about due process, Ailsa, and who's entitled to it. President Trump wants to be allowed to deport migrants as quickly as possible so he can deliver on his mass deportation goals. And in this case, that would mean expelling people to third countries without notice or hearings. Whether the Trump administration is going to ultimately be allowed to do that permanently is something that's still going to be argued in the courts, but for now, the Supreme Court seems to be OK with it.
CHANG: That is NPR's Adrian Florido, and you are listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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