Lawyers specializing in immigration are urgently asking the U.S. Supreme Court to maintain a previous court decision that prevents the government from deporting individuals to countries they are not citizens of without ensuring due process is followed.

In a 43-page document opposing the Trump administration’s request for a stay, lawyers representing a group of immigrants subject to potential deportation to third countries criticized the government for the issue they raised in their recent urgent appeal.

“Defendants’ own choices—to violate the district court’s orders and to opt to implement the court’s remedy for those violations overseas—are causing the operational and diplomatic difficulties about which they complain,” the motion reads. “But Defendants exaggerate the scope of their harm and the extent to which the injunction limits their pursuit of lawful solutions. Defendants’ real grievance is with being ordered to comply with the law prohibiting third-country deportations to countries where noncitizens would face persecution or torture.”

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The dispute in the case stylized as DHS v D.V.D. stem from a three-month-long series of opinions issued by U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy, a Joe Biden appointee, which finally culminated in a national injunction barring such third-country deportations.

The stream of court orders in the case was steady – six from the district court; two from a court of appeals – and responsive to the Trump administration’s continued efforts to conduct third-country deportations.

Murphy, for his part, repeatedly rebuked the government – reiterating and clarifying orders; certifying the class to broaden the scope of relief – after planes full of immigrants were sent to El Salvador on two separate occasions in violation of another judge’s orders.

Later, the government attempted a similar flight to Libya – but abandoned that effort at the eleventh hour and returned several immigrants to detention. After that, the government actually put a plane in the air bound for South Sudan – only to stop in Djibouti where the immigrants are now housed on a U.S. military base.

In the stay application, Solicitor General D. John Sauer claimed Murphy’s orders were “wreaking havoc” on President Donald Trump’s immigration plans and complained the court was also disrupting “sensitive diplomatic, foreign-policy, and national-security efforts.”

But, in Murphy’s orders, the lower court explained, the real issue was the Trump administration violating its commitments under the Convention Against Torture (CAT).

“In short, the Government expressed no concern that deportations in violation of the Convention Against Torture could be occurring immediately and regularly in the days until the preliminary injunction; the Court does not share the same disregard for probable due process violations protected by the Constitution and enumerated in both statute and treaty,” Murphy wrote in one opinion.

Murphy’s opinion issuing the nationwide injunction elaborated:

Defendants argue that the United States may send a deportable alien to a country not of their origin, not where an immigration judge has ordered, where they may be immediately tortured and killed, without providing that person any opportunity to tell the deporting authorities that they face grave danger or death because of such a deportation. All nine sitting justices of the Supreme Court of the United States, the Assistant Solicitor General of the United States, Congress, common sense, basic decency, and this Court all disagree.

The plaintiffs say the lower court was right – and accuse the government of all-but admittedly violating binding international law.

“Defendants acknowledge their CAT obligations in passing, but resist giving any meaningful substantive content to those obligations, even as they seek removal of third-country nationals to countries that are the subjects of ‘Do Not Travel’ advisories from the U.S. Department of State,” the opposition motion goes on. “Their quarrel is not with the injunction but with the law itself and, thus, is not something this Court should remedy by means of an emergency stay.”

In service of their argument to try and pause the lower court’s order, the government included a declaration from Secretary of State Marco Rubio which, they argued, pinned unrest in Libya on the injunction.

The plaintiffs rubbished this basic effort – and the government’s interpretation of what Rubio actually said about the court case.

“Remarkably, Defendants, through a declaration from the Secretary of State, blame the district court for an episode of political unrest in Libya, an unstable country with two warring governments and where, according to the State Department travel advisory issued well before the events at issue in this case, ‘[o]utbreaks of violence between competing armed groups can occur with little warning,”” the motion goes on. “Moreover, Secretary Rubio’s declaration itself makes clear that it was not the [injunction] that triggered the political conflict he described, but rather the fact of potential third-country removals from the United States becoming publicly known in Libya.”

The government, in their stay application, also complained about the aborted South Sudan flight, griping that Murphy “slammed on the brakes while these aliens were literally mid-flight—thus forcing the government to detain them at a military base in Djibouti not designed or equipped to hold such criminals.”

Again, the plaintiffs say, the government is reaching for a conclusion which is not supported by the actual facts in the case.

From the opposition motion, at length:

It is disingenuous for Defendants to assert that the district court compelled them to keep the class members at a U.S. military base in Djibouti…The district court did not force Defendants to keep anyone at a military base in Djibouti. Quite the opposite: it stated only that Defendants are only required to “maintain custody and control” over the class members, until they afford them the due protections of the [injunction]. Where the class members were held was a matter the district court left to Defendants, who had the option of avoiding diplomatic complications by returning them to detention in the United States or moving them to any other overseas location where they had the logistical and diplomatic capacity to hold them…

If the alleged harms to the United States’ interests from class members’ continuing presence in Djibouti are as significant as Defendants claim, they retain the authority to return the individuals to the United States. Accordingly, any harm Defendants are suffering is not irreparable and is capable of reparation by unilateral action on their part. Class members, by contrast, are stranded incommunicado in Djibouti, a country of which they have no knowledge, and en route to another country, South Sudan, where none have ever set foot and which remains engulfed in ongoing and intensifying armed conflict.