Gratuitous Cruelty: The Supreme Court Just Unleashed Trump
In a cold-hearted decision, five conservative justices allowed the president to restart his deportation plan.
Late Monday night, the Supreme Court issued two rulings that together connote such gratuitous cruelty that it is difficult to comprehend what could be going on in the minds of the far-right justices in the majority.
In the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, Chief Justice John Roberts halted the lower court’s order directing that the Trump administration bring back a man whom it admits to having erroneously sent to the brutal CECOT prison in El Salvador, where he remains confined.
And in Trump v. J.G.G., a 5-4 majority conceded that Trump must give people basic due process before snatching them off the streets under the guise of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act. It nonetheless lifted another lower court order halting that practice, on the dubious technical theory that the plaintiffs should not have filed their class action case in Washington, DC. Each individual case, the Court reasoned, belongs instead in the courts located in the states in which they were detained.
Not only is the Court’s rationale legally shaky – as Justice Sonia Sotomayor ably explained in her dissenting opinion to which Justices Elena Kagan, Ketanji Brown Jackson, and Amy Coney Barrett in large part joined – but it leaves the people whom Trump already denied due process without immediate recourse to vindicate their constitutional rights. The ruling instead requires them to find lawyers who will file separate lawsuits around the country in order to secure the most basic of liberties: freedom from arbitrary searches and seizures of their bodies. This makes it harder for individuals and easier for Trump. It’s a win for a president who fully admits to violating the Constitution right now.