It upset the Supreme Court’s three progressive justices and their fans at the New York Times, but the Court’s conservative majority was on solid ground earlier this week in staying a lawless order imposed by a federal district judge in Massachusetts that effectively barred the Trump administration from deporting illegal aliens to “third countries” — i.e., countries to which they neither choose to be deported nor have ties of citizenship, birthright, residence, or prior travel.
I wrote about the case a month ago, contending that the Supreme Court must reestablish the bright lines of federal immigration law. Congress has sought to divest federal district judges of jurisdiction and restrict judicial review of cases involving removal of illegal aliens to a single challenge before a circuit court of appeals — limited to purely legal objections, with the circuit generally required to accept the fact-finding of the Justice Department’s immigration tribunals.
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