20 May Supreme Court Keeps Block on Trump Administration’s Use of Alien Enemies Act to Deport Venezuelans, Sends Case Back to Fifth Circuit
On May 16, 2025, in a 7-2 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court sent a case back to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit to determine whether the Trump administration can summarily deport a group of Venezuelan detainees under the Alien Enemies Act. The Supreme Court also determined that the lower federal court should rule on how much notice the federal government must provide to allow the migrants to challenge the government’s plans to deport them.
Referring to circumstances such as the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man who was deported by mistake and subsequently left in a Salvadoran prison despite a Supreme Court order to facilitate his return to the United States, the Supreme Court noted in this case that “notice roughly 24 hours before removal, devoid of information about how to exercise due process rights to contest that removal, surely does not pass muster.”
Lee Gelernt, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, said the decision “means that more individuals will not secretly be sent to a brutal prison in El Salvador,” and that the administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act, a wartime law, “during peacetime, without due process, raises issues of far-reaching importance.”
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