Trump’s Two (Partial) Supreme Court Victories
The justices are playing it close to the vest.
Good morning! It’s Tuesday, April 8, 2025. Election Day 2025 is 210 days away. Thanks for waking up to politics.
President Trump scored two victories at the Supreme Court on Monday — although neither of them was a sweeping win. Let’s break it down:
The most notable ruling came in Trump v. J.G.G., the case brought by five Venezuelan men suing to prevent the Trump administration from deporting them under the Alien Enemies Act (AEA) of 1798.
As you may recall: Trump signed a proclamation invoking the AEA on March 14, designating members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua (TdA) as alien enemies. The administration said that this gave them broad powers to deport those they deemed as TdA members without due process.
On March 15, U.S. district judge James Boasberg ordered the administration to temporarily refrain from deporting the five men until legal questions involving the administration’s use of the AEA were resolved. Later that day, he certified all Venezuelan migrants being targeted under the AEA as a class and broadened his order to temporarily block any deportations under the law.
However, by that time, 137 Venezuelans being deported under the AEA were already on planes bound for a notorious El Salvador prison. Boasberg verbally ordered the administration to turn the planes around, which they did not do, later arguing that they weren’t bound by a verbal order and that Boasberg lacked jurisdiction anyways. He eventually formalized his order in writing, but the planes had already landed. The administration has not tried to invoke the AEA since then, in keeping with Boasberg’s order.
That was the status quo until Monday, when the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 to lift Boasberg’s temporary block on deportations under the AEA. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a Trump appointee who has been increasingly breaking from the court’s conservative wing, joined the liberals in dissent.
You can read the court’s unsigned opinion here, but essentially, the justices sided with the Trump administration on a technicality: they ruled that challenges to a use of the AEA can’t be brought under the Administrative Procedure Act, as lawyers for the Venezuelans had tried to do, but instead have to be brought as habeas corpus cases. Habeas corpus (Latin for “you should have the body”) is the process by which a prisoner can challenge the legality of their conviction and confinement.
The two things about habeas cases that are relevant here: 1) they have to be brought individually, which means the Venezuelans can no longer challenge the administration as a class, and 2) they have to be brought in the district in which a prisoner is being kept. In the case of the five Venezuelans, that’s in Texas, which is why the justices dissolved Boasberg’s order: since he’s based in D.C., he was the wrong judge to go to, the Supreme Court ruled.
The Venezuelan men will have to restart their legal fight in Texas. In the meantime, there is no legal order stopping the administration from resuming use of the AEA.
But there’s a catch. The justices also ruled that migrants targeted under the AEA are entitled to judicial review — not only after they are deported, but before.
“AEA detainees must receive notice after the date of this order that they are subject to removal under the Act,” the court’s majority wrote. “The notice must be afforded within a reasonable time and in such a manner as will allow them to actually seek habeas relief in the proper venue before such removal occurs.”
This is not how the administration had interpreted the AEA up until this point: they had previously been deporting people under the AEA without any notice or opportunity for due process. Notably, a concurrence by Justice Brett Kavanuagh underlined that “all nine Members of the Court agree that judicial review is available,” which means that even the most conservative justices supported that aspect of the ruling.
Beyond that, the majority opinion didn’t delve into the broader questions at issue in the case, including whether the AEA — which can only be used in cases of a “declared war” or “invasion” waged by a “foreign nation or government” — applies to TdA, which has ties to the Venezuelan government but is not a formal state actor.
The ruling also didn’t weigh in on the administration’s alleged non-compliance with Boasberg’s order: the judge is still considering holding the administration in contempt, although he may be less likely to do so now that the Supreme Court has said he was the wrong judge for the case to be brought to in the first place.
Finally, the court declined to shed light on legal opportunities available to the Venezuelans who have already been sent to the El Salvador prison, some of whom claim not to be TdA members at all.
Which brings us to the next case that saw SCOTUS action on Monday: Noem v. Abrego Garcia.
This is a case involving someone who is presently in the El Salvador prison, although he was not deported under the AEA. The plaintiff is Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an El Salvador native who illegally entered the U.S. in 2011.
Abrego Garcia was arrested in 2019, when the government cited a confidential informant in alleging that he was a member of the MS-13 gang. An immigration judge ruled that that “the evidence shows that he is a verified member of MS-13”; another judge later said Abrego Garcia could be deported, but ruled that he could not be deported to El Salvador because of dangers he would face there.
The government had never tried to deport him somewhere else, and he’s been living in Maryland since then — until last month, when the government did send him to El Salvador, despite the order expressly forbidding that. The Trump administration has openly acknowledged its mistake in court, saying Abrego Garcia’s deportation to El Salvador was an “administrative error,” but has also argued that they have no way to return him to the U.S. and no court can order them to do so.
U.S. district judge Paula Xinis disagreed with that, and ordered the government to return Abrego Garcia to the U.S. by the end of the day yesterday. An appeals court later upheld Xinis’ order.
But Chief Justice John Roberts stepped in on Monday to pause Xinis’ order. Roberts’ paragraph-long order relieved the government from having to comply with the approaching deadline, but offered no indication of how the case will unravel after that.
Roberts called for more legal filings, signaling that he paused the deadline so he could have more time to consider the broader case before deciding whether or not Abrego Garcia should be returned.
It’s hard to read anything into the pause one way or the other: in February, Roberts issued a similar order temporarily pausing a district judge’s order on foreign aid funding, before siding with the court’s liberals (and Barrett) to uphold the same order the next week.
How the court eventually rules in this second case, involving Abrego Garcia, could give a hint as to how the court will handle those alleged TdA members implicated in the first case who have already been sent to El Salvador with an unclear pathway to legally challenge their detainment.
In general, it feels as though the court is trying to give away as little as possible in its rulings in Trump cases. In all the disputes that have reached them so far, the justices have rarely tipped their hand, generally ruling on technicalities or deadlines rather than opining much on the merits.
Most of these cases have concerned temporary restraining orders, rather than final opinions, so it makes sense that the court’s opinions would be composed of process questions — but, even so, many have been structured in a way that makes it very difficult to deduce even a signal of where the court might eventually rule when the disputes inevitably return to them.
The court’s conservative majority certainly seems in no rush to confront Trump, but neither do they seem to be in a rush to endorse his sweeping legal arguments — at least, not with Roberts and Barrett there.
Whether the court is leaning towards rejecting or embracing Trump’s theories of executive power, this much is clear: they don’t want to do it yet, and they have no desire to give any hints of which way they’re leaning until then.
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The day ahead
President Trump will sign an executive order on tapping coal power and deliver remarks at a fundraising dinner for the House GOP campaign arm. Trump will also reportedly meet with a group of House Republicans, in an attempt to persuade them to support the Senate-passed budget resolution, which several conservatives have threatened to oppose.
The Senate will vote to confirm Elbridge Colby as Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, George Glass as the U.S. ambassador to Japan, and Mike Huckabee as the U.S. ambassador to Israel.
The House will vote on the No Rogue Rulings Act, which would limit the power of federal district courts to issue a nationwide injunctions.
The Supreme Court has no oral arguments scheduled.
As usual, excellent and understandable summaries of these two cases. Gabe, I don't know how you find time for all the excellent coverage you provide on so many diverse stories each day.
I would like to add, though, that since the point of selecting the District of Columbia as venue for the JGG case was at least partly the likelihood of a sympathetic district judge's being appointed (which is what occurred) the 5-4 holding in the Supreme Court would seem to be a devastating blow to the plaintiffs and future plaintiffs. Forum shopping works both ways. If a writ of habeas corpus requires that the case be filed by an individual in the district in which he is being imprisoned, this means that the administration can simply hold the prisoner in a district with a sympathetic judge. There are Federal District Courts in Texas which contain only a single fulltime judge. So instead of almost certain defeats in the D.C. District and the D.C. Circuit, the administration can look forward to a huge likelihood of sympathetic judges in Texas along with the conservative 5th Circuit Court of Appeals overseeing those lower courts. This is not just a technicality. There is no more powerful weapon against a court than to rule that it lacks subject matter jurisdiction, which is what the 5-4 ruling in JGG expressly provided as they stripped Boasberg of the case. So the forum shopping in these cases is over for the plaintiffs. They will be filing wherever the administration happens to be holding the prisoners. And a class action has also been expressly eliminated as a possibility since habeas corpus is the sole remedy and habeas corpus must be filed by an individual not a class. I don't see much light at the end of the tunnel for the plaintiffs in this case. I also find it interesting that in the last few Supreme Court TRO rulings either Roberts or Barrett has been in the majority (making the majority possible, in fact). So whenever these two agree on something it would appear that they will be the power brokers. When they disagree the conservative side will win.
Knowing that the minority would rightly be alarmed that the Court would rule in JGG without full briefing and argument, Roberts made a deal. He would vote with the majority on this one but only if Noem v. Garcia went to the Court fully briefed, etc. Roberts knows that Garcia will be is a very difficult case for the government to win and he want the decision to be free of error. And assuming Garcia wins and the government has to bring him back, doesn’t that serve as precedent for bringing the Venezualans back?