WASHINGTON (AP) — A ruling to halt deportations of people to countries other than their own threw a core immigration policy of the Trump administration into question, at least temporarily, and prompted a desperate appeal to the Supreme Court on Thursday.
The administration said the ruling by the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals came Wednesday just minutes before midnight, forcing the cancellation of a flight with 70 people that was headed to three countries. It said justices needed to step in to “halt that chaos” and said the flight cancellation “required a new round of diplomatic engagement with each of the three countries,” which it did not name.
Plaintiffs for immigrants sought emergency relief from the appeals court Wednesday night, saying they heard from “multiple sources” that a deportation flight was scheduled the next day from Alexandria, Louisiana, to Burundi, Rwanda and the Central African Republic.
Within hours of that request, the appeals court said it was clarifying a ruling against the policy last week and said a previous order allowing flights to continue while legal challenges play out was no longer in effect.
Administration officials reacted furiously. Attorney General Todd Blanche said the order “in the dark of night” robbed authorities of “an entirely legal and valuable tool to stem the tide of illegal immigration.”
The vast majority of people deported to countries other than their own have been sent to Mexico, but under a series of often-secret agreements, the administration has deported thousands of others to more than two dozen countries, from Liberia to Guyana.
Some have found themselves in countries they’d never heard of before their arrivals and held there against their will. Some also face serious safety risks, and are left with little choice except to return to the home countries they were fleeing.
This month, lawyers for two men deported to Equatorial Guinea said they were beaten and held at gunpoint in a hotel-turned-detention center by police who covered their heads with bags.
The government asked for an immediate halt to lower court orders finding that people must have the chance to object before the U.S. government deports them to countries other than their homelands.
The justices previously allowed the deportation flights to temporarily continue when the case came before them last year. Since then, an appeals court has upheld a Boston-based judge’s final ruling that migrants must have a meaningful chance to argue a third-country deportation would put them in danger of persecution or torture.
The ruling didn’t prohibit those deportations outright but it lengthens the process. The government argues it has already led to the cancellation of a flight carrying 70 people with criminal convictions to three different countries.
“The government has been able to remove thousands of aliens to third countries in recent months, and thousands more are eligible for such removal,” Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote.
Trump's Republican administration has said that it sends people to third countries when it is unable to quickly return them to their homelands. Those third-country governments provide assurances that people won’t be persecuted or tortured, attorneys said.
The lower courts' legal requirements would mean cascading delays and could force the reworking of agreements with foreign countries, attorneys wrote.
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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Tim Sullivan contributed to this report from Minneapolis. Follow the AP's coverage of the U.S. Supreme Court at https://apnews.com/hub/us-supreme-court.
