The Supreme Court’s deference to Trump is astounding

The nation’s federal judges — including appointees of presidents of both parties, Donald Trump’s among them — have been the bulwark against Trump’s reign of lawlessness on deportations, spending, federal appointments and more. Repeatedly, lower courts have been standing up for the Constitution and federal law, trying to constrain a president contemptuous of both, at demonstrable danger to themselves. But too often, the administration disregards their orders.

You’d think the Supreme Court — in particular Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., the overseer of the judicial branch — would have the lower courts’ backs. But no, as the high court’s conservative majority shamefully showed in a ruling on Monday.

That decision in one of many deportation challenges wasn’t the court’s first such display of deference to a president who doesn’t reciprocate. And, safe bet, it won’t be the last.

The court allowed the Trump administration to at least temporarily continue deporting migrants to countries not their own, unsafe ones at that, with little or no notice and no chance to legally argue that they could face torture or worse. No matter that lives are at stake — the justices blithely lifted an injunction by Judge Brian E. Murphy, of the U.S. District Court in Boston, that had blocked the administration’s slapdash deportations while legal challenges wend through the courts.

In a blistering 19-page dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, marshaled legal arguments, damning examples of Trump administration dissembling and defiance of lower courts, and warnings of more defiance of federal courts from an emboldened president.

In contrast, the ruling from the Supreme Court majority was just one paragraph — unsigned legal mumbo-jumbo, its decision wholly unexplained, as is typical in the cases that the court takes all too frequently on an emergency basis, the aptly named “shadow docket.” (In two other shadow docket rulings in May, Trump was allowed to revoke the legal status of hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans, Cubans, Nicaraguans and Haitians, many of whom were here under programs created to protect refugees from violent, impoverished and repressive countries. Why? Who knows?)

What’s all the more maddening about the Supreme Court’s opacity in overriding both Judge Murphy and an appeals court that backed him is that its preliminary support for Trump in this case contradicts the plain language of the justices’ unanimous ruling in April that people subject to deportation “are entitled to notice and an opportunity to challenge their removal.”

“Fire up the deportation planes,” crowed a spokeswoman for the Homeland Security Department.

Such callous gloating surely didn’t surprise Sotomayor. Her dissent began, “In matters of life and death, it is best to proceed with caution. In this case, the Government took the opposite approach.” And so did her conservative colleagues.

As Sotomayor wrote, historically the Supreme Court stays a lower court order only “under extraordinary circumstances.” Typically it doesn’t grant relief when, as in this case, both district and appeals courts opposed it. And certainly it doesn’t give the government a W when the record in the case, like this one, is replete with evidence of its misconduct, including openly flouting court orders.

Examples: A judge agreed a Guatemalan gay man would face torture in his home country, yet the man was deported there anyway. The administration violated Judge Murphy’s order when it put six men on a plane to civil-war-torn South Sudan, which the U.S. considers so unsafe that only its most critical personnel remain there. And in a third case, a group was unlawfully bound to Libya before a federal judge was able to halt the flight.

Thus, Sotomayor said, the Supreme Court granted the Trump administration “relief from an order it has repeatedly defied” — an order that didn’t prohibit deportations but only required due process in advance.

As she put it, the decision to stay the order was a “gross” abuse of the justices’ discretion. It undermines the rule of law as fully as the Trump administration’s lawlessness, especially given that Americans look to the nation’s highest court as the last word on the law.

“This is not the first time the Court closes its eyes to noncompliance, nor, I fear, will it be the last,” Sotomayor said. As if on cue, the Supreme Court’s decision was followed on Tuesday by news that underscored just how dangerously misplaced the conservative justices’ deference toward Trump is.

A former Justice Department official, who was fired for truthfully testifying in court that Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia had been wrongly deported to El Salvador, blew the whistle on his former colleagues — all Trump appointees — confirming in a 27-page document that they’d connived to defy court orders. Emil Bove, Trump’s former defense lawyer and now his nominee for a federal appeals court seat, allegedly advised a group of DOJ lawyers in March to tell the courts “f— you” if — when — they tried to stop Trump’s deportations. Bove on Wednesday told the Senate he had “no recollection” of saying that; he might have denied it, as a DOJ associate did to the media, but Bove was under oath.

And the alleged phrase captures the administration’s attitude toward the judiciary, a coequal branch of government, though you’d hardly know it by the justices’ kowtowing to the executive branch. The message, while more profane, matches Trump’s own take on lower-court judges. “The Judges are absolutely out of control,” he posted in May. “Hopefully, the Supreme Court of the United States will put an END to the quagmire.”

For the sake of courageous judges who follow the law, and the rest of us, we can hope otherwise — even if the justices’ early record is mixed at best.

@Jackiekcalmes @jackiecalmes.bsky.social @jkcalmes