By Andrew Chung
(Reuters) -President Donald Trump‘s administration asked the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday to intervene in its effort to rapidly deport migrants to countries other than their own without the opportunity to raise claims that they fear being persecuted, tortured or killed there.
The Justice Department requested that the justices lift Boston-based U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy’s nationwide injunction requiring that migrants be given the chance to seek legal relief from deportation before they are sent to so-called “third countries,” while litigation continues in the case.
The administration said in its filing that the third-country process is critical to removing migrants who commit crimes because their countries of origin are often unwilling to take them back.
“As a result, criminal aliens are often allowed to stay in the United States for years on end, victimizing law-abiding Americans in the meantime,” it told the justices.
The filing represented administration’s latest trip to the nation’s highest judicial body as it seeks a freer hand to pursue Trump’s crackdown on immigration and contest lower court decisions that have impeded the Republican president’s policies.
The administration has said Murphy’s injunction is preventing potentially thousands of pending deportations. The injunction “disrupts sensitive diplomatic, foreign policy and national security efforts,” it said in Tuesday’s filing.
The Department of Homeland Security moved in February to determine if people granted protections against being removed to their home countries could be detained again and sent to a third country.
Immigrant rights groups then mounted a class action lawsuit on behalf of a group of migrants seeking to prevent rapid deportation to newly identified third countries without notice and a chance to assert the harms they could face.
In March, the administration issued guidance providing that if a third country has given credible diplomatic assurance that it will not persecute or torture migrants, individuals may be deported there “without the need for further procedures.”
Without such assurance, if the migrant expresses fear of removal to that country, U.S. authorities would assess the likelihood of persecution or torture, possibly referring the person to an immigration court, according to the guidance.
Murphy issued a preliminary injunction in April, finding that the administration’s policy of “executing third-country removals without providing notice and a meaningful opportunity to present fear-based claims” likely violates due process protections under U.S. Constitution’s Fifth Amendment. Due process protections generally require the government to provide notice and an opportunity for a hearing before taking certain adverse actions.
Murphy said that the Supreme Court, Congress, “common sense” and “basic decency” all require migrants to be given adequate due process.
The Boston-based 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on May 16 declined to put Murphy’s decision on hold.
As with previous cases challenging Trump’s far-reaching executive actions and initiatives, the case raised further questions over whether the administration is defying court orders.
Murphy on May 21 ruled that the administration had violated his court order by attempting to deport migrants to South Sudan.
“The government has continued to flout the district court’s order. Behind the government’s rhetoric is not an emergency, but the law. The law requires due process,” Trina Realmuto, one of the lawyers for the plaintiffs with the National Immigration Litigation Alliance, said on Tuesday after the administration’s filing.
The injunction requires due process before deporting migrants to third countries including those “where the State Department has documented systemic human rights abuses and violence against foreign nationals,” Realmuto said.
‘INTOLERABLE CHOICE’
The migrants, now being held at a military base in Djibouti, all had committed “heinous crimes” in the United States, the administration told the Supreme Court, including murder, arson and armed robbery.
“As a result, the United States has been put to the intolerable choice of holding these aliens for additional proceedings at a military facility on foreign soil – where each day of their continued confinement risks grave harm to American foreign policy – or bringing these convicted criminals back to America,” the Justice Department said.
Murphy has also ordered that non-citizens be given at least 10 days to raise a claim that they fear for their safety.
In another action, Murphy modified his injunction to guard against the possibility of the Department of Homeland Security ceding control of migrants to other agencies to carry out rapid deportations, after the administration took the position that the U.S. Department of Defense was not covered by his orders.
It made that argument after acknowledging the Defense Department flew four Venezuelans held at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba to El Salvador following Murphy’s initial ruling.
After Reuters reported in May that the U.S. military could deport a group of migrants for the first time to Libya, Murphy issued an order saying such removals would “clearly violate” his ruling.
(Reporting by Andrew Chung in New York; Editing by Will Dunham)
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