President Donald Trump criticized the Supreme Court after it temporarily blocked his administration’s efforts to deport Venezuelan migrants under the Alien Enemies Act during the weekend, stating that the U.S. “cannot give everyone a trial.”
“We would need hundreds of thousands of trials for the hundreds of thousands of illegals we are sending out of the country,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Such a thing is not possible to do.”
The Supreme Court ruled in early April that the government must provide notice “within a reasonable time” so detainees can challenge the decision before their removal. In the days that followed, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) alleged that detainees were not being given sufficient time to challenge their removals, the Supreme Court intervened again on Saturday halting deportation flights and ordering a temporary freeze on deportations for migrants detained in parts of Texas until further notice.
The Trump administration had originally invoked the Alien Enemies Act, an 18th-century wartime law, to deport Venezuelan men it claimed were affiliated with criminal organizations. The law was applied to justify the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.
“My team is fantastic, doing an incredible job, however, they are being stymied at every turn by even the U.S. Supreme Court, which I have such great respect for, but which seemingly doesn’t want me to send violent criminals and terrorists back to Venezuela, or any other Country, for that matter,” said Trump in his post, adding that “if we don’t get these criminals out of our Country, we are not going to have a Country any longer.”
Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, who Trump praised in his post, dissented from the Supreme Court’s emergency order. In his opinion, Alito criticized the majority’s decision to intervene without lower court rulings:
“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. I refused to join the Court’s order because we had no good reason to think that, under the circumstances, issuing an order at midnight was necessary or appropriate”
Originally published on Latin Times
