The Trump administration on Thursday asked the U.S. Supreme Court to step in on what’s known as the “shadow docket” and clear the way for deportations of immigrants to countries they have no ties to at all.
The legal fight dates back to March 2025, when several detained men challenged a Department of Homeland Security directive allowing such removals. The case grew more complicated after DHS tried to send eight men — none of them Sudanese nationals — to South Sudan. Following a string of court orders, those men ended up detained on a U.S. military base in Djibouti, in East Africa.
This isn’t the first time the policy has landed before the justices on an emergency basis. U.S. District Judge Brian E. Murphy, appointed by President Joe Biden, has twice blocked the deportations, and the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has twice stepped in to let the policy resume.
Earlier this month, though, the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals became the first appeals court to weigh in on the substance of the case — and it found the policy runs afoul of several federal laws. That ruling came after Murphy issued his own decision on the merits back in February.
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Interestingly, the 1st Circuit had earlier granted the Justice Department an emergency stay of Murphy’s merits ruling — essentially the same kind of relief the DOJ is now asking the Supreme Court to grant against the 1st Circuit’s own decision.
In a 45-page emergency filing, Solicitor General D. John Sauer urged the justices to swiftly reverse the appellate court through an administrative stay, and to keep that pause in place until the case works its way fully through the appeals process before the high court.
The request opens by pointing to the administration’s past wins on the emergency docket over this same issue.
“This is the third time the government has been forced to seek emergency relief from the district court’s orders in this case about ‘third-country removals’—an essential tool to remove certain aliens, including some of the worst criminal aliens,” the filing states. “This Court granted relief on both previous occasions. The latest order rests on the same fundamentally flawed legal premises as the previous rulings, and the nominal new grounds that the lower courts added to try to buttress those prior decisions are even weaker than those that failed to sustain the originals.”
In siding against the administration, the 1st Circuit found that DHS had sidestepped a number of rules and safeguards meant to protect people with fear-of-persecution claims during removal.
The government pushed back, arguing the appellate court was confused about how the relevant statutes work in practice, and it also raised a broader jurisdictional argument about which courts are even allowed to review these kinds of deportation disputes.
“[T]he lower courts simply relied on the same meritless grounds on which the preliminary injunction was based,” the filing continues. “The courts again disregarded multiple jurisdictional bars that preclude judicial review of aliens’ claims of persecution or torture except in a petition for review from a removal order.”
The appellate panel had also raised concerns that the third-country removal process left people without real notice or a fair chance to raise fear-of-persecution claims under the law.
In its filing, the DOJ defended giving deportees just one day’s notice to raise such claims about a country they might be sent to.
“The lower courts’ preference for more elaborate and lengthy procedures cannot overcome the lack of statutory support for imposing such procedures, much less the sort of requirements the district court imposed by fiat when enforcing the preliminary injunction,” Sauer wrote.
The panel also questioned the value of “blanket assurances” from countries willing to accept deportees, noting that people with legitimate fear claims could still face violence from “rogue agents and non-state actors” once there.
The DOJ dismissed that concern as little more than a paperwork gripe.
“Neither the lower courts nor respondents have identified any sort of imminent or irreparable harm from the government’s ability to obtain those assurances categorically versus one-by-one, or with respect to withholding. Because either decision would rest on the same basis (i.e., that no alien will be tortured or persecuted), any requirement for ‘individualized’ determinations amounts to a paperwork demand,” the filing argues.
Sauer also emphasized the practical fallout from the 1st Circuit’s ruling and its effect of reviving the earlier block on removals.
“The unexpected springing-back of district court’s order has, this Office is informed, created substantial logistical problems with ongoing removal operations — including the cancellation of flights — and led to added expense, potential diplomatic issues, and the inability to remove dangerous criminals,” the filing states. “Those disruptions will only get worse. To halt that chaos, an immediate administrative stay should be entered while the Court considers this application.”
