Barrett joins liberal dissent questioning SCOTUS venue decision that ends case before judge deemed 'lunatic' by Trump
A prison guard transfers deportees from the United States, alleged to be Venezuelan gang members, to the Terrorism Confinement Center in Tecoluca, El Salvador, on March 16. (Photo by the El Salvador presidential press office via the Associated Press)
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday lifted a temporary restraining order that banned the Trump administration from using the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport alleged Venezuelan gang members, ruling that the legal challenge should have been filed in Texas, rather than Washington, D.C.
In an April 7 per curiam decision, the Supreme Court majority said detainees challenging their deportations must seek relief using habeas corpus, and those actions can only be brought in the district in which they are confined—in this case, Texas. The detainees had instead used the Administrative Procedure Act in their legal challenge filed in Washington, D.C.
U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg of Washington, D.C., had issued the TRO and was clashing with Department of Justice lawyers as he sought to learn whether the government violated his order when it flew detainees to a prison in El Salvador in Central America. The government had claimed that details about the flights were protected by the state secrets privilege.
President Donald Trump has written on social media that Boasberg is a “radical left lunatic of a judge, a troublemaker and agitator” who should be impeached.
The Supreme Court did not decide whether the government could use the Alien Enemies Act to deport the suspected gang members to a prison in El Salvador. The government invoked the law after designating a Venezuelan gang as a foreign terrorist organization.
But the Supreme Court did say the detainees are entitled to a notice that they are subject to removal under the law “within a reasonable time and in such a manner as will allow them to actually seek habeas relief in the proper venue,” the opinion said.
The high court’s three liberal justices dissented, as did Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who partly joined a dissent by Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
All nine justices agree that the detainees are entitled to notice, Sotomayor wrote in a second part of her dissent, which was joined by Barrett and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and Justice Elena Kagan.
“That means, of course, that the government cannot usher any detainees, including plaintiffs, onto planes in a shroud of secrecy, as it did on March 15, 2025. Nor can the government ‘immediately resume’ removing individuals without notice upon vacatur of the TRO, as it promised” a federal appeals court it would do, Sotomayor wrote.
“To the extent the government removes even one individual without affording him notice and a meaningful opportunity to file and pursue habeas relief, it does so in direct contravention of an edict by the United States Supreme Court,” Sotomayor said.
Barrett, Kagan and Jackson also joined another part of Sotomayor’s opinion, which questioned the majority’s conclusion that the detainees had to file a habeas action.
“At the very least, the question is a thorny one, and this emergency application was not the place to resolve it,” Sotomayor wrote.
In a section of her dissent not joined by Barrett, Sotomayor said the government may prefer to litigate at least 300 individual habeas claims, rather than fight the class of plaintiffs in the case before Boasberg.
“That is especially so because the government can transfer detainees to particular locations in an attempt to secure a more hospitable judicial forum,” she wrote.
Jackson wrote a separate dissent criticizing the Supreme Court’s “fly-by-night approach” to its work stemming from decisions on emergency motions without full briefing and argument.
“At least when the court went off base in the past, it left a record so posterity could see how it went wrong,” she wrote, citing the 1944 Korematsu v. United States decision upholding the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.
“With more and more of our most significant rulings taking place in the shadows of our emergency docket, today’s court leaves less and less of a trace. But make no mistake: We are just as wrong now as we have been in the past, with similarly devastating consequences. It just seems we are now less willing to face it,” Jackson wrote.
Publications covering the Supreme Court’s decision include Reuters, Courthouse News Service, Law360 and SCOTUSblog.
The case is Trump v. J.G.G.
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