Judge Affirms Deportation Decision Despite Supreme Court’s Temporary Halt

A federal judge’s order preventing eight men from being deported to South Sudan “remains in full force and effect,” as he announced on Monday, despite the Supreme Court staying his nationwide preliminary injunction that halted third-country deportations.

Although U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy’s April injunction—that prevented people classified as illegal immigrants from being deported to countries they have no official connections with—has been lifted broadly, Murphy argues that he can still make rulings on specific cases. This includes the situation of the men trapped in Djibouti who were to be deported to South Sudan, a nation in the midst of a civil war.

And it appears that the high court’s lack of explanation in its Monday stay opened the door for Murphy to take such an action.

Murphy’s May 21 order regarding the eight deportees “remains in full force and effect, notwithstanding today’s stay of the Preliminary Injunction,” the judge, a Boston-based Joe Biden appointee, wrote in a docket-only order on Tuesday. He was responding to an emergency motion filed by the eight men in the wake of the high court’s ruling, finding the motion “unnecessary” as, in his eyes, they are already protected under his previous ruling uninfluenced by the Supreme Court’s stay.

He pointed to the scathing dissent from Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

“[T]he District Court’s remedial orders [were] not properly before [the Supreme] Court because the Government has not appealed them, nor sought a stay pending a forthcoming appeal,” he quoted from her writing, joined by the court’s two other liberal justices, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

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The Trump administration took clear notice of Murphy’s Monday action.

“The district court judge in Boston has said he is going to defy the Supreme Court’s ruling, so expect fireworks tomorrow when we hold this judge accountable for refusing to obey the Supreme Court,” White House adviser Stephen Miller told Fox News’ Sean Hannity on Monday night after celebrating the high court’s ruling. However, as previously stated, Murphy has not actually “said he is going to defy” the Supreme Court; he is rather contending that the stay on his nationwide injunction does not apply to this specific case.

Still, the men’s request to be returned to the U.S. while their immigration cases proceed was not granted, and they remain in Djibouti, keeping them in more of a fragile middle ground than, say, O.C.G., a Guatemalan man who Murphy saw returned to the U.S. after the Trump administration admitted he was “wrongfully” deported to Mexico.

At the core of the third-country deportation cases is deportees’ claims that they must be given an opportunity to share their fears of danger in the country with which they have no official affiliation. With the eight men in Djibouti, those fears stems from reports of human rights violations in South Sudan; with O.C.G., it concerned his fear of being persecuted in Mexico over his sexuality and given that he was mistreated while traveling through there just last year.