The Supreme Court on Tuesday allowed the Trump administration to resume deporting migrants to countries other than their own, including people whose home countries won’t accept them and people with criminal convictions. The interim order leaves migrants exposed to removal as the justices consider whether the policy is legal.
The court issued a brief, unsigned order and didn’t explain its reasoning. The three liberal justices dissented, but gave no explanation for their position. The ruling puts an appeals court decision on hold and will remain in effect until the Supreme Court issues its judgment.
The order isn’t a final decision on the policy. The court will hear arguments in December 2026 and expects to decide the case by July. It set questions about whether the district court had jurisdiction, whether it could decide the case for the entire affected class, and whether the administration’s policy is lawful. The court also let the administration propose “other questions” for consideration.
Removal by agreement
The policy lets the government send people with final deportation orders to third countries when officials can’t return them to their homelands or their home countries refuse to receive them. The administration says governments receiving deportees provide assurances that they won’t face persecution or torture.
CNN estimates that authorities have removed 25,000 migrants under the policy. AP reported that the administration deported about 25,000 people to more than two dozen countries under a series of often-secret agreements, including Liberia and Guyana; the vast majority went to Mexico. Some migrants have gone to countries with which they have no ties.
The administration told the Supreme Court that a lower-court ruling forced it to cancel a deportation flight carrying about 70 people bound for three countries. It said the ruling caused “substantial logistical problems with ongoing removal operations,” created “chaos,” required “a new round of diplomatic engagement,” and disrupted sensitive negotiations with countries willing to accept deportees.
The administration also argued that judicial intervention could cause “significant and irreparable harm to U.S. foreign policy.” It called finding countries willing to accept deportees “a delicate diplomatic endeavor.”
Protection claims and the courts
The dispute centers on the Convention Against Torture, which the Senate ratified in 1994 and which generally bars deportation or extradition to countries where a migrant might be tortured. The law doesn’t spell out exactly how the administration must assess that risk or what process migrants should receive.
Lower courts have ruled that migrants must receive notice and a meaningful opportunity to raise a credible, country-specific fear of torture or persecution before removal. The Department of Homeland Security argues that blanket assurances from a destination country that no deportee will be tortured are enough.
Attorneys for migrants said the lower-court judgment didn’t require their clients’ release from detention, bar third-country removals, or undo existing arrangements. “Denying a stay does not prevent third-country removals. Rather, it simply requires them to do so lawfully,” they told the Supreme Court.
Those attorneys also alleged that people removed without meaningful notice or an opportunity to raise protection claims had faced “prolonged and arbitrary detention, beatings and sexual assault, disappearance, and chain refoulement.” AP reported that some migrants have been imprisoned in countries they’d never heard of before arrival, faced serious safety risks, and had little choice but to return to the countries they fled.
Temporary authority, continuing challenge
The administration asked the Supreme Court on September 24 to pause a decision by the Boston-based 1st US Circuit Court of Appeals that effectively blocked the removals. It had also challenged a February ruling by a federal district court in Massachusetts that imposed additional procedural requirements. The Supreme Court granted the request to put that ruling on hold while it considers the case and told its clerk to set a briefing schedule for December arguments.
This marks the third time the Supreme Court has let the administration enforce the policy temporarily. The court allowed it to continue temporarily last year, over the dissent of Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, and later sided with the administration in a case involving migrants held for several weeks on a military base in Djibouti.
Immigrant rights groups drew attention to the policy after reporting that migrants initially bound for South Sudan were detained in Djibouti in a converted Conex shipping container. Attorneys for immigrants said many deportees had no criminal convictions and had been found to face a risk of torture or persecution.
White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis said the Supreme Court had been called upon to stay “the same local district judge’s campaign to halt the Trump Administration from removing illegal aliens including many of the worst-of-the-worst criminals to countries willing to receive them.” She added, “The President will stop at nothing in his effort to make America safe again. Today’s ruling from the Supreme Court yet again affirms the lawfulness of the President’s homeland security agenda.” The justices have not yet decided whether the policy is lawful.