On Tuesday, September 29, the Supreme Court temporarily ruled that the Trump administration can deport immigrants to third-countries, or a country other than the one they consider their homeland. The ruling comes as a win for the Trump administration amidst a slew of cases set to be heard by the Supreme Court relating to migrants and immigrants. The emergency ruling went unsigned, as is normal for these one-page rulings. Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, the three liberal justices on the court, noted they would not have voted in favor of resuming third country deportations.
Deborah Pearlstein, Director of Princeton’s Program in Law and Public Policy, notes in a written statement notes how, as this case is an “‘interim’ decision on [the Court’s] ‘emergency’ or ‘shadow’ docket…the Court hasn’t actually yet decided the important Due Process issue in the case – it has just said the administration can continue its existing policy while the case challenging its legality is making its way through the Courts.”
Douglas S. Massey, an Emeritus professor of Sociology at Princeton University, shared in a written statement “I would think the policy [of third country deportations] violates both the 5th and 14th Amendments. It’s part of a process known as ‘crimmigration’: treating what had been civil infractions of immigration law as criminal offices.”
He continues that “the Trump administration has cut the funding and personnel for immigration courts, compelling judges to resort to short cuts such as collective trials and hearings that effectively deny immigrants a chance to defend themselves.” The second Trump administration fired around 25 percent of immigration judges while around 3 million cases are in the Immigration court backlog and 2.3 million immigrants await asylum hearings. While this year, around 750 thousand immigrants have been ordered to be deported, only 24 percent of those immigrants served a removal order had an attorney in Immigration court.
As of early September, the Trump administration sent at least 25,000 immigrants to a minimum of 29 third-countries. Many of these countries are undergoing active armed conflicts and are widely considered unsafe, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Libya, and South Sudan. According to United States law, the government may not deport persons to any country where they shall be persecuted, tortured, or sent into harm.
In March of 2025, former Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem posted a video of herself at the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT), a maximum security prison in El Salvador, and one of the confirmed locations for third country deportations. Her message: “President Trump and I have a clear message to criminal illegal aliens: LEAVE NOW. If you do not leave, we will hunt you down, arrest you, and you could end up in this El Salvadorian prison.” There have been reports of sexual violence, torture, and solitary at the facility towards asylum seekers. Around 300 deportees have been sent to CECOT by the Trump administration.
Another one of the prisons the United States is using third country deportation processes to send migrants to is a complex in Juba, South Sudan known to have unsafe living conditions. These men were transferred to South Sudan after a lower U.S. federal court had issued a block on third country deportations and prior to the Supreme Court’s temporary reversal on September 29th. South Sudan is one of the poorest nations in the world and is actively fighting a high-casualty civil war.
The Supreme Court has fast tracked the case and will hear oral arguments in December. The final ruling on the case can be expected in the next year.
