In all, the ruling marks an astonishing defeat for the Trump administration. The court did not decide whether the president can, in fact, wield the Alien Enemies Act to banish migrants to a foreign prison. But it imposed vital constitutional safeguards on his efforts to do so, protecting more innocent people from unlawful expulsion and imprisonment overseas. And the court did all this on an exceptionally expedited basis, with minimal briefing and no argument. For the majority, it was not a close call: The government’s attempt to disappear migrants to a foreign black site is egregiously unconstitutional.
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In its new, unsigned decision—which was released without warning—the court explained and expanded its dramatic order last month. Immigrants, it noted, are entitled “to due process of law in the context of removal proceedings,” a fact that the court unanimously affirmed in a related case six weeks ago. So, under the Fifth Amendment, “no person shall be removed from the United States without opportunity, at some time, to be heard.” Here, the majority held, at a minimum, that migrants “must have sufficient time and information to reasonably be able to contact counsel, file a petition, and pursue appropriate relief.” It noted pointedly that, in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the government has claimed that it has no authority to retrieve migrants who’ve been sent to CECOT, and that federal courts have no jurisdiction to order their return. Migrants’ interests in a robust due process, the majority wrote, “are accordingly particularly weighty.”
But the government barely provided any due process at all. Instead, it gave migrants notice “roughly 24 hours” before they were scheduled to be expelled to CECOT. These “notices” were entirely “devoid of information about how to exercise due process rights to contest that removal.” Such a barebones, eleventh-hour warning “surely does not pass muster,” the court concluded. It therefore decided, as a matter of law, that the Trump administration had run afoul of migrants’ due process rights. And it instructed the lower courts to determine exactly what kind of process would satisfy the Constitution. In the meantime, the court maintained its freeze on further deportations under the Alien Enemies Act, prohibiting the government from attempting more summary deportations from Texas to El Salvador under cover of darkness.
This holding, alone, is remarkable. The Supreme Court pointedly did not wait for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit to opine on the due process question. Instead, it leapt over the 5th Circuit and decreed that the Trump administration ran afoul of the Constitution, only leaving the lower court to decide the contours of what process is due. (And the 5th Circuit’s eventual decision on the matter will stay frozen until SCOTUS intervenes again.) This procedure is rarely deployed and is reserved for extraordinary cases in which a lower court has failed to act swiftly and responsibly. Indeed, the majority opinion bristles with irritation that the (conservative-leaning) lower courts did not swiftly address the planned deportations in this case, dragging their feet for so long that SCOTUS had to step in. The majority sounds irritated not just that the government failed to heed its earlier admonition that migrants must get due process, but also that the lower courts did not expeditiously enforce that protection here.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/05/supreme-court-analysis-donald-trump-cecot-plan.html
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