Donald Trump is still seething at the Supreme Court after it issued a ruling Friday continuing to block his efforts to deport immigrants without due process by citing an archaic wartime law.
On Saturday, Trump shared a post on Truth Social from lawyer Mike Davis, one of his most extreme MAGA allies, claiming that the Supreme Court put “an illegal injunction on the president of the United States, preventing him from commanding military operations to expel these foreign terrorists.”
Davis added in the post that Trump “should house these terrorists near the Chevy Chase Country Club, with daytime release.” (Supreme Court Justices John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh both live in Chevy Chase, Maryland.)
Trump shared another post from Davis complaining that the justices had blocked Trump from deporting undocumented immigrants “without years of court process.” The president wrote, “The Supreme Court must come to the RESCUE OF AMERICA.”
To be clear, the Supreme Court did not block Trump from deporting undocumented immigrants or foreign-born terrorists, but rather his effort to deport immigrants under the Alien Enemies Act, a 1798 law infamously used to justify the internment of Japanese Americans.
Trump has deported hundreds of Venezuelans using the Alien Enemies Act, shipping the immigrants to prisons in El Salvador known for civil rights abuses. The basis for these deportations is that Trump’s administration determined the immigrants to be members of a gang that the president has deemed a terrorist organization.
The administration’s claims about the immigrants’ gang ties appear to be extremely specious — and several courts have ruled that Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act is unlawful, because the law is meant to be used during an “invasion” or “predatory incursion” by a foreign nation, neither of which is happening.
The Supreme Court has not weighed in on whether Trump is using the Alien Enemies Act lawfully. Rather, the justices have taken issue with his failure to respect the immigrants’ right to due process, as guaranteed by the Constitution.
The high court previously ruled that Trump must give immigrants the ability to challenge their removal under the Alien Enemies Act. Last month, Trump’s administration attempted a new round of deportations using the law. This time, immigrants were given written notice of their pending removal under the Alien Enemies Act, but only in English. They were given hours to contest their removals, and were not informed of their right to do so.
The Supreme Court stepped in, temporarily halting those removals. On Friday afternoon, the Supreme Court issued a 7-2 decision prohibiting more deportations under the Alien Enemies Act for now and sending the matter back to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals for further review.
Justices wrote that the government’s notice to the immigrants facing deportation was insufficient: “notice roughly 24 hours before removal, devoid of information about how to exercise due process rights to contest that removal, surely does not pass muster.”
The justices quoted from their previous ruling directing the Trump administration to respect immigrants’ due process rights: “[T]he Fifth Amendment entitles aliens to due process of law in the context of removal proceedings,” they wrote.
Trump has now posted several complaints about the ruling, as has Stephen Miller, the president’s deputy chief of staff.
“The courts are sabotaging democracy,” Miller wrote Saturday on X, as he shared a post with a screenshot of a finding in a CBS News/YouGov poll. The poll found that, as of late April, 56 percent of Americans approve of the Trump administration’s program to find and deport immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally.
That same poll found, however, that two thirds of Americans believe that a noncitizen should get a court hearing or other U.S. legal process before Trump can deport them (as is the law.)
And the poll found 85 percent of Americans believe that if the Supreme Court rules against the Trump administration on a policy or executive action, the Trump administration should follow the court’s ruling.
