Justice Alito issues scathing dissent to SCOTUS ruling barring Trump from deporting Tren de Aragua members

Justice Samuel Alito was joined by Justice Clarence Thomas in dissenting the Supreme Court's ruling that the Trump administration must "not to remove any member of the putative class of detainees from the United States until further order of this court." The decision was released in the wee hours of Saturday morning.

The case, brought to the Court by the ACLU, was an attempt to block the deportation of Venezuelan nationals from a holding facility in Texas. The ACLU also filed their case for emergency action with the Northern District Court in Texas as well as the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans.

The dissent from Alito took issue with the Court for having "hastily and prematurely granted unprecedented emergency relief." At issue for Alito was the term "putative class," which he said the Court "does not define."

"Although the order does not define 'putative class,' it appears that the Court means all members of the class that the habeas petitioners [the ACLU] sought to have certified, namely '[a]ll non citizens in custody in the Northern District of Texas who were, are, or will be subject to the March 2025 Presidential Proclamation entitled 'Invocation of the Alien Enemies Act Regarding the Invasion of the United States by Tren De Aragua' and/or its implementation,'" Alito wrote.

Turning the illegal immigrants into a "class" was also an issue for Solicitor General D. John Sauer, who said in his filing for the Court to "dissolve" their ruling that illegal immigrants cited for deportation under the Alien Enemies Act are not a class because each circumstance is "inherently too individualized" for them to be considered all as one. The New York Times indicated that the ACLU used the term class to indicate that "the justices should protect the detainees as part of a proposed class action."

In his dissent, Alito noted, "Although the Court provided class-wide relief, the District Court never certified a class, and this Court has never held that class relief may be sought in a habeas proceeding."

"And although the Court does not specify what it means by '[t]he Government,' it appears that the term is intended to embrace all the named defendants, including the President."

Alito says further, in his 5-page dissent, that the Court did not first determine if they even have jurisdiction—the case was open in two lower courts. The Supreme Court could have taken the case on appeal. In this case, the ACLU brought the emergency petition without having taken the case through a lower court.

"When this Court rushed to enter its order," Alito wrote, "the Court of Appeals was considering the issue of emergency relief, and we were informed that a decision would be forthcoming. This Court, however, refused to wait."

The Court also issued its ruling with only the papers from the applicants and no response from the Government. "The only papers before this Court were those submitted by the applicants. The Court had not ordered or received a response by the Government regarding either the applicants' factual allegations or any of the legal issues presented by the application. And the Court did not have the benefit of a Government response filed in any of the lower courts either."

When the ACLU filed in the district court, that court gave the Trump administration 24 hours to respond. The Supreme Court, per Alito, jumped over that step unlawfully. That "obligation" to respond was dissolved when the Supreme Court usurped jurisdiction.

The ACLU had said the Venezuelan illegal immigrants were in "imminent danger for removal," a statement for which Alito said there was no evidence offered. The ACLU had raised the alarm, saying that the illegal immigrants were being boarded onto busses and taken to the airport at the time of their filing in court. Alito cited a different case, Trump v J.G.G., in which the Trump administration had already said that no deportations were planned for the days in question.

"In sum," he wrote, "literally in the middle of the night, the Court issued unprecedented and legally questionable relief without giving the lower courts a chance to rule, without hearing from the opposing party, within eight hours of received the application, with dubious factual support for its order, and without providing any explanation for its order."