The Supreme Court Just Gave ICE Back Its Third-Country Deportation Machine

On Tuesday the US Supreme Court's conservative majority handed the Trump administration exactly what it asked for: the power to load migrants onto planes bound for countries they have never set foot in, with no notice and no hearing to argue they might be tortured or killed when they land. The 6-3 order lifted a Boston federal judge's injunction and let "third-country" deportations resume immediately, while the Court schedules arguments for December and a written ruling sometime after that. In the meantime, the deportations don't pause. They accelerate.

This is not a hypothetical harm. More than 25,000 people have already been deported to 29 countries under this policy since it was implemented last year, according to a tally by human rights groups — the majority to Mexico, but others to South Sudan, Uganda, Equatorial Guinea, Liberia, and the Central African Republic. US District Judge Brian Murphy, who first blocked the practice, found the administration "repeatedly violated, or attempted to violate" his own orders — including one requiring extra steps before sending men to South Sudan, a country the US State Department itself tells Americans to avoid because of the risk of armed conflict and kidnapping. Plaintiffs' lawyers say deportees have been beaten, sexually assaulted, detained, or disappeared after arrival. The Boston-based 1st Circuit upheld most of Murphy's ruling on September 18. Eleven days later, six justices erased it anyway.

Read the mechanics closely, because they are the point. The policy lets DHS deport someone to a country that has given a vague "diplomatic assurance" it won't persecute them — no hearing required. For countries that haven't even bothered with that fig leaf, a person is only screened for fear of harm if they manage to raise the objection themselves, mid-processing, usually detained, usually without a lawyer. This isn't a loophole in due process. It's a machine built to make due process optional whenever the destination is obscure enough that nobody's watching. A DHS official's own celebratory statement — "a bad day for criminal illegals and open-borders activists alike" — tells you who this is designed to punish: not just people ICE calls criminals, but anyone the state finds administratively inconvenient, including people who had already won legal protection from deportation to their actual home countries.

The pattern matters more than any single ruling. This Court has now sided with the administration on third-country removals three times in fifteen months — staying Murphy's initial order in June 2025, clearing the South Sudan removals that same July, and now lifting the appeals court's affirmation entirely, before even hearing full arguments. Each intervention arrives on the shadow docket, unsigned, with liberal justices dissenting into the void. The December argument date is not a check on power — it's a formality scheduled after the harm is already done to thousands of people. By the time this case gets a full opinion, the deportation flights will have long since landed.

None of this is unique to Washington. Every state that wants to disappear people it has decided are surplus first builds the legal cover, then normalizes the practice before the courts finish arguing about whether it was ever legal. The lesson isn't that the system failed — it's that for people without citizenship, without money, without a lawyer waiting at the gate, the system is working exactly as designed. Solidarity here means naming which agencies are executing these flights, which airlines are chartering the planes, and which local officials cooperate with ICE handoffs — because the paperwork trail from a Boston courtroom to a cell in Juba runs through people who have addresses.

Sources

Reuters: Supreme Court lets Trump resume deporting migrants to countries not their own

Supreme Court of the United States, order in case 24A1153

SCOTUSblog: background on the June 2025 stay