WASHINGTON − The Supreme Court, for the third time, backed the Trump administration’s efforts to deport migrants to countries other than their own without giving them the chance to show they could be persecuted or tortured there.
The court on Sept. 29 paused a federal judge’s decision that the administration’s policy – a key tool in President Donald Trump’s deportation crackdown − is unlawful.
The ruling was the third time the court allowed the administration to carry out the practice while it’s being challenged.
The court also said it will hear arguments on the issue in December in order to reach a final decision by the end of June.
The court's three liberal justices said they would have kept the policy on hold in the meantime.
The administration
told the justices the procedure is “an essential tool to remove certain aliens, including some of the worst criminal aliens” whose home countries refuse to take them back.
Attorneys for the migrants challenging the policy said it’s being used to deport longtime U.S. residents, many without criminal histories, causing “grave and irreversible harms” that have included disappearances, beatings and sexual assaults.
More than a dozen United Nations human rights experts have urged the administration to stop the practice.
Thousands of migrants have been deported over the past 15 months and thousands more are eligible for removal, according to the Justice Department.
The Department of Homeland Security canceled a flight scheduled to take 70 migrants to three different countries after an appeals court this month largely backed a ruling by Boston-based U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy that threw out the administration’s third-country removal plan.
Murphy said the administration can’t rely on another country’s assurances that the migrants will not be persecuted or tortured. Instead, the migrants must be given a meaningful chance to show that they would be harmed in the third country, the judge ruled.
The administration argued in its Supreme Court appeal that Murphy’s decision was just as wrong as the previous ones the justices blocked last year in earlier stages of the litigation.
“While certain aliens may benefit from stalling their removal, the Nation does not,” the Justice Department wrote in its emergency appeal.
Lawyers for the migrants responded in a filing that the judge correctly concluded the policy is unlawful and the migrants – not the administration – will suffer the greater harms if officials are allowed to continue the deportations until the Supreme Court considers the administration’s full appeal.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: In win for Trump, Supreme Court allows third-country deportations to resume
