In an emergency request Thursday, the Trump administration urged the Supreme Court to revive its policy of deporting some migrants to places other than their country of origin, a practice that was struck down by a lower court on the grounds that it violates deportees’ due process rights.
The Justice Department asked the high court to pause a February 2026 order from a federal judge, largely upheld by an appellate court last week, that requires federal immigration officials to give deportees more due process. The courts said deportees need to get notice and a chance to challenge their deportation before any attempt to remove them to a so-called “third country” where they have no ties.
Such a pause would allow the Department of Homeland Security to continue a policy that empowers officials to send detainees to third nations, without providing them notice or a chance to challenge that deportation, if the receiving country has made blanket assurances that they will not persecute or torture the deportees.
Justice Department lawyers said DHS already had to cancel a flight to three third countries for 70 would-be deportees, some of whom have criminal records, in the wake of the adverse rulings from Boston-based judges.
In the emergency appeal, Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote that the third-country removal policy has allowed the Trump administration to remove “thousands” of individuals in recent months. He estimated that “thousands more” are eligible to be deported to third countries.
“These include some of the worst of the worst criminal aliens — whose home countries refuse to take them back,” he wrote. “The order below would again obstruct DHS from efficiently removing aliens — this time under a policy that has been in force for 15 months” because of earlier court orders.
Sauer also said that the lower court’s decision “undermines our standing abroad.”
“Finding third countries willing and able to accept aliens is a delicate diplomatic endeavor,” Sauer wrote. “By interjecting itself in that process, and potentially disrupting those carefully negotiated arrangements, the lower courts’ actions ‘will cause significant and irreparable harm to U.S. foreign policy.'”
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who handles emergency appeals from Massachusetts and other states in the region, gave lawyers for the immigrants challenging the policy until Monday afternoon to respond.
Sauer asked Jackson to provide the administration with temporary relief while it considers the emergency appeal.
As part of its far-reaching crackdown on illegal immigration, the Trump administration has brokered agreements with dozens of countries around the globe, mainly in Africa and Latin America, that have agreed to accept deportees from the U.S. who are not their citizens.
Some of the African nations that have agreed to such deportations include countries plagued by repressive governments, armed conflict, human rights abuses and widespread poverty, such as Equatorial Guinea, the Central African Republic and South Sudan.
While some countries, like Eswatini and South Sudan, have received deportees from the Trump administration who have violent and serious criminal histories, other nations, like Liberia, have accepted deported migrants from Latin America and other places across the world with no known criminal records, beyond immigration violations in the U.S.
In Liberia, CBS News interviewed men and women from Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras and Venezuela who were deported to the West African country last month and described feeling stateless. All of them said they were deported to West Africa without being notified in advance or given an opportunity to challenge the deportation.
Immigration officials have mainly targeted two categories of individuals in their third-country deportation campaign: immigrants who won limited legal protections in U.S. immigration courts barring ICE from deporting them to their homelands, and detainees whose home countries limit or reject U.S. deportations.
The dispute over the third-country removals has already been before the Supreme Court, though during an earlier stage in the case.
In a divided decision last year, the high court allowed the Trump administration to resume deportations to third countries while legal proceedings continued. Then, the Supreme Court lifted an order from the federal judge in Boston overseeing the challenge that had prevented the administration from removing immigrants without first giving them the chance to raise fears of torture or persecution.
