The legal fight over the Trump administration’s “third country” deportation policy returned to a Massachusetts courtroom this week, where U.S. District Judge Brian E. Murphy said the government’s approach violated due process for migrants seeking to challenge removal. Murphy ruled that the policy must be set aside and ordered that his latest decision be paused for 15 days while the government weighs an appeal.
Murphy’s ruling came Wednesday in a case that had already climbed to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Supreme Court last year paused Murphy’s earlier order, clearing the way for a flight carrying several migrants to complete its trip to war-torn South Sudan, a country they had no ties to. In Wednesday’s decision, Murphy said the current DHS policy guidance again ran into constitutional problems even after the higher court’s earlier pause.
In his opinion, Murphy held that migrants challenging DHS “have the right to ‘meaningful notice’ and an opportunity to object before they are removed to a third country.” He wrote that the policy “extinguishes valid challenges to third-country removal by effecting removal before those challenges can be raised,” according to the text of his ruling.
Murphy also tied the procedural defects to the government’s handling of key information. The judge said the “simple reality” was that neither the merits of individual class members’ claims nor the substance of any objections could be assessed because government officials were “withholding the predicate fact: the country of removal.”
Murphy framed the due-process issue in terms of bedrock constitutional protection, writing, “These are our laws, and it is with profound gratitude for the unbelievable luck of being born in the United States of America that this Court affirms these and our nation’s bedrock principle: that no ‘person’ in this country may be ‘deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.’” The judge, who was nominated to the bench by Democratic President Joe Biden, ordered the suspension of his decision for 15 days so the government could appeal.
The case also reflects the Supreme Court’s broader view of “third country” removals. In June, the conservative majority found immigration officials can quickly deport people to third countries, and two liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissented. Murphy said the new policy guidance did not resolve the procedural concerns he had already identified.
Murphy said President Donald Trump’s administration had repeatedly violated, or tried to violate, the judge’s prior orders. He cited an example from last March, when the Defense Department deported at least six class members to El Salvador and Mexico without providing the process required under a temporary restraining order Murphy issued. Murphy said DHS issued its new policy guidance for third-country removals on March 30, two days after his order.
The lawsuit centers on immigrants who had been granted protection from being sent back to their home countries, where they said they feared being tortured or persecuted. According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, eight men sent to South Sudan in May had been convicted of crimes in the United States and had final orders of removal.