WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Tuesday let President Donald Trump's administration continue swiftly deporting people to countries other than their own for now, while the justices consider whether the policy is legal.
The apparent 6-3 order temporarily lifts lower court requirements for migrants to get a chance to object before being sent to countries to which they have no ties.
The Supreme Court will hear arguments in December.
Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson would have kept the lower court order in place.
The Trump administration said last week the lower court order forced the cancellation of a deportation flight carrying about 70 people bound for three countries.
The conservative majority has sided with the administration before on the core Trump administration policy, allowing deportation flights to temporarily continue last year.
The court said it will consider several questions: whether the policy is lawful, whether lower courts had the authority to consider the case and issue a sweeping block, as well as other questions the government deems appropriate.
The order “has now allowed the administration to resume sending people to third countries where they may face persecution, torture, imprisonment, or other grave danger,” said Trina Realmuto, executive director of the National Immigration Litigation Alliance and one of the lawyers representing immigrants in the case.
“But today’s order does not decide that the government’s policy is lawful,” she said in a statement. “The Court will hear that question on an expedited schedule.”
Under a series of often-secret agreements, the Trump administration has deported some 25,000 people to more than two dozen countries, from Liberia to Guyana. The vast majority have been sent to Mexico.
Trump’s Republican administration has said that it sends people with final deportation orders to third countries when they can't be returned to their homelands or their native countries won’t accept them, including those who have criminal convictions. Those governments provide assurances that people won’t be persecuted or tortured, federal attorneys said.
Attorney General Todd Blanche called the policy “an entirely lawful and critical tool for immigration enforcement" in a social media post.
Some migrants, though, have found themselves imprisoned in countries they'd never heard of before their arrivals. Others also face serious safety risks and are left with little choice except to return to the home countries they were fleeing. Many have no criminal convictions and have been found to be at risk of torture or persecution, attorneys for the immigrants said.
The case comes amid a sweeping immigration crackdown by the Trump administration, which has pledged to deport millions of people who are living in the United States illegally.
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AP correspondent Tim Sullivan contributed to this report from Minneapolis.
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