By Daniel Trotta
(Reuters) – U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito criticized the court majority for “hastily and prematurely” blocking the Trump administration from deporting a group of Venezuelan migrants with an emergency ruling in the early morning hours of a holiday weekend.
Alito’s five-page dissent arrived late Saturday night, nearly 24 hours after the Supreme Court temporarily barred the government from deporting a group of accused Venezuelan gang members under a rarely used wartime law known as the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.
“In sum, 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 receiving the application, with dubious factual support for its order, and without providing any explanation for its order,” Alito wrote in the dissent, which was also joined by Justice Clarence Thomas.
Alito and Thomas are members of the court’s 6-3 conservative majority.
American Civil Liberties Union lawyers had asked the high court to intervene on an emergency basis, arguing that dozens of Venezuelan migrants faced imminent deportation without having a realistic opportunity to contest their removal, despite a previous Supreme Court ruling that they must be allowed judicial review.
“The Government is directed not to remove any member of the putative class of detainees from the United States until further order of this Court,” the justices said in an unsigned decision issued around 12:55 a.m. (0455 GMT) on Saturday.
The White House responded that President Donald Trump would stay the course in his immigration crackdown but gave no immediate indication that the administration would defy the Supreme Court, appearing for now to avert a potential constitutional crisis between coequal branches of government.
Although it was unclear where the Venezuelan migrants were headed, the Trump administration already has deported to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador more than 200 Venezuelan and Salvadoran men it claims are gang members.
Many of the migrants’ lawyers and family members say they were not gang members and had no chance to dispute the government’s assertion that they were.
Elected last year on a promise to crack down on migrants, Trump and his senior aides have asserted that their executive power grants them wide authority on immigration matters. They have shown limited evidence linking the detainees to Tren de Aragua, a violent gang that is active in South America but one that has a smaller presence in the United States.
(Reporting Daniel Trotta in Carlsbad, California, and Andrew Chung in New York; editing by Diane Craft)
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