The Supreme Court just keeps giving Trump a free pass to engage in what Mike Masnick correctly called “human trafficking.” It’s stuff this nation has never done before because it’s never been run by someone quite like Trump before. To maximize the cruelty inflicted on immigrants, the Trump administration (steered directly by its chief ghoul, Stephen Miller) has repeatedly ejected migrants into anywhere but their native lands, putting most of them in countries even our own State Department recommends everyone steer clear of.
Any country with a history of human rights abuse or is considered to be “war-torn” is a favored destination for people this administration wants erased from the US population count, if not from the world itself.
And despite this being a particularly novel and particularly cruel abuse of immigration enforcement powers, the Supreme Court has refused to block this on multiple occasions. Any time an appellate court says the government can’t do this, the government immediately runs to its SCOTUS enablers to get injunctions stayed pending its appeal.
SCOTUS did this June 2025 over the lengthy dissent of justices who rarely have anything to do these days but express their disagreement with the conservative far-right majority that runs the court. And now it has done it again — targeting the same appellate court (First Circuit) that ruled only a few days earlier that it would not be allowing the injunction against vanishing migrants into war-torn hellholes to be stayed pending the administration’s constant stream of appeals.
This ruling runs only a paragraph as well. And the three justices dissenting from the majority’s decision to reimpose the stay on the injunction are the ones you expect. There’s nothing new to write here, so they don’t. However, the majority does at least suggest it might actually consider the case on its merits in the near future, rather than just keep hitting the reset button without explanation every time a court sides with the victims of the administration’s abject cruelty.
From the one-paragraph preamble to the SCOTUS order list [PDF]:
The application for stay presented to Justice Jackson and by her referred to the Court is granted. The February 25, 2026 order and judgment of the United States District Court for theDistrict of Massachusetts, case No. 1:25-cv-10676, are stayed. The application is also treated as a petition for a writ of certiorari, and the petition is granted. The parties are directed to brief and argue the following questions: (1) Whether the district court had jurisdiction over Respondents’ claims. (2) Whether the district court had authority to enter classwide declaratory relief and APA vacatur under 8 U. S. C. §1252(f)(1). (3) Whether the Government’s Guidance on third-country removals is unlawful under 8 U. S. C. §1231(b), the Due Process Clause, or FARRA/CAT and its implementing regulations. (4) Such other questions that the Government determines are appropriate for the proper disposition of the case. The Clerk is directed to establish a briefing schedule that will allow the case to be argued in the December 2026 argument session.
The upside is that the government will have to present an argument in favor of its actions and try to support it with existing precedent. The bad news is that SCOTUS is cutting corners on behalf of the administration by treating an application for a stay as a writ of certiorari. They’re not the same thing and doing this just means the right-wing majority is going to pretend the government has already filed a brief containing its arguments for lifting the stay to the court, which it absolutely hasn’t done. On top of that, the government gets to choose what “other questions” are pertinent to this case — a courtesy that’s not being extended to the plaintiffs who just got shit on by SCOTUS undercutting their injunction without saying anything more than “we’ll discuss this at a later date and the administration will get to lead the discussion.”
On the other hand, there’s always a chance the administration will talk itself out the good graces of the ultra-conservative majority by making arguments so bad or blatantly bigoted everyone but Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito will be forced to reject them.
But, as it stands now, the government is free to kidnap people off the streets, deprive them of their due process rights, and ship them to whatever country they think might make these migrants the most miserable.