Is This Why the Supreme Court Broke the Way It Did on the Alien Enemies Act Case?

UPDATE: Trump responds:

pic.twitter.com/PzAzgI5Lub
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) May 16, 2025

pic.twitter.com/Dz3Fyl0pbI
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) May 16, 2025

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As Sarah wrote, we lost this one in the Supreme Court. It wasn’t even close. We can’t even blame Chief Justice John Roberts, who became the quasi-leader of the liberal wing when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away. Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas were the only justices not keen on the courts exceeding their scope. Roberts, Amy Coney Barrett, and Brett Kavanaugh all sided with the liberals, and now the Trump administration must provide time for these terrorists in Tren de Aragua to have their day in court regarding their deportations.

🚨BREAKING NEWS: The Supreme Court just issued a ruling BLOCKING President Trump from using the Alien Enemies Act to deport criminal illegal gang members.

Justices Alito and Thomas dissent. pic.twitter.com/3OioWuafH5
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) May 16, 2025

BREAKING: The US Supreme Court voted 7-2 to BLOCK the Trump administration from using the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelan illegal alien gang members being held in Texas.

Justices Alito and Thomas dissented. pic.twitter.com/2CyRVRemJX
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) May 16, 2025

Remember, it’s not that the Trump White House can’t use the Alien Enemies Act to deport people—they can. It’s the timetable for them to challenge their ouster, which now borders on the absurd. The Biden administration imported these people into our country, many of them on taxpayer-funded flights, where they raped, murdered, stole, and committed a campaign of terror and mayhem among law-abiding citizens. These people, who are here illegally, cannot be booted en masse expeditiously. They can arrive by their thousands quickly but can’t be deported under the same timeframe. Talk about a way for people to attack the legitimacy of the courts, for which it’s richly deserved (via NBC News):

The 7-2 decision, which grants a request made by a group of Venezuelans, clarified an unusual order issued by the justices in the early hours of April 19 that hit pause on any government plans to deport people held in northern Texas.
The justices in the latest unsigned decision faulted the administration for only giving the detainees 24 hours to launch legal challenges.
"Under these circumstances, notice roughly 24 hours before removal, devoid of information about how to exercise due process rights to contest that removal, surely does not pass muster," the ruling said.
But the court concluded that the justices themselves, "far removed from the circumstances on the ground," are not best placed to determine exactly what process should be followed.
Therefore, the court sent the case back to an appeals court for further proceedings to determine what due process the detainees should receive.

Is there another reason for this ruling? Did the Abrego Garcia case influence the Court to not trust the Trump administration? Erick Erickson, formerly of RedState, pitched this: “7-2 told you so. You do not bring back Abrego Garcia and the Supreme Court is going to shut down the whole operation. This is on the Administration. They should have brought back Garcia. But they signaled misfeasance then defiance.”

7-2. I told you so. You do not bring back Abrego Garcia and the Supreme Court is going to shut down the whole operation. This is on the Administration. They should have brought back Garcia. But they signaled misfeasance then defiance. https://t.co/agnp7r5CTh
— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) May 16, 2025

I’ll let you debate that post in the comments section.

'Cynical Publius' had another take:

OK, calm down everyone please.

SCOTUS did not say that deportation under the Alien Enemies Act is unconstitutional.

SCOTUS simply sent the case back down to the lower court with instructions to decide whether the President's order is unconstitutional, and how much notice the… https://t.co/cHsdyniucp
— Cynical Publius (@CynicalPublius) May 16, 2025

Obama deported people—hundreds of thousands, in fact. That’s not to say he was great on immigration, because he wasn’t, but the former president did deport a ton of people, which earned him the ire of immigration groups. They might have tweaked some of the numbers, but a lot of people got the boot. They were able to come back, but we digress. The point is, I’m sure under Obama, the 400,000-plus who were deported in 2014 alone didn’t get a trial.

What are we even doing here?