On May 21st, in a rapidly convened hearing, Judge Murphy of the U.S. District Court for Massachusetts said that “The department’s actions in this case [were] unquestionably violative of [the] court’s order.”
Days before this hearing, a plane with eight men had taken off from the United States, according to a press conference held by the Department of Homeland Security. Only one of these men were from South Sudan, as the rest are from Cuba, Mexico, Myanmar, Laos, and Vietnam. However, the DHS decided to fly them to South Sudan anyways. The issue was that Judge Murphy had already issued a temporary restraining order to stop the Trump administration from removing “any individual subject to a final order of removal,” to “a country other than the country designated for removal in … prior immigration proceedings” without providing them with written notice of the country in question and a “meaningful opportunity” for the individual to file for protections. In this case, the government had given the eight men mere hours to file for protection against their removal and had not informed them that they could file for such protections. These men were being sent to South Sudan, a country wracked by civil war, with more than 130,000 people being internally displaced in 2025 alone, and where the State Department has warned Americans not to travel to.
South Sudan soldiers patrol the street in Juba, South Sudan, on February 13, 2025. (CNN).
However, the eight men who were headed to South Sudan did not make it there. Instead, the government took them to a US Navy Base in Camp Lemonnier, Djibouti where they are being held in a shipping container. According to a court declaration, there is limited lighting inside the container, the daily temperature outside exceeds 100 degrees, and there is an imminent threat of rocket attacks from terrorist groups in Yemen.
In another case, at least four men were removed to El Salvador without warning. They were all from Venezuela and had final orders of removal to Venezuela. Yet, the government had moved the men from the US to Guantanamo Bay and then to El Salvador without warning. It had been a clear violation of Judge Murphy’s court order, yet the government claimed it had not been a violation because the Defense Department, not DHS, flew the plane to El Salvador. It is difficult to imagine a situation in which the Defense Department would act on its own in this case, without DHS coordination, and if they did, it appears to raise new questions about what authority the Defense Department would have to carry out this action, as Judge Murphy had pointed out.
Yet, the Supreme Court, in a 6-3 decision, stayed Judge Murphy’s TRO pending a final ruling by the appeals court and/or the Supreme Court. It had done so via the shadow docket, issuing their decision without explaining how they came to the conclusion that they did. In Justice Sotomayor’s dissent, she pointed out that the court had ignored the clean hands doctrine in granting the stay. When considering whether to grant equitable relief, non-monetary relief such as injunctions and stays, courts are meant to consider whether the party seeking relief has “unclean hands.” In other words, as Sotomayor stated, “For centuries, courts have “close[d] the doors” of equity to those “tainted with inequitableness or bad faith relative to the matter in which [they] see[k] relief.” … That principle, “rooted in the historical concept of [the] court of equity as a vehicle for affirmatively enforcing the requirements of conscience and good faith,” ensures that courts do not become “‘abettor[s] of inequity.’”” However, the court ignores the fact that the government ignored the court’s order, as Judge Murphy had stated, and instead it grants equitable relief to the government who has unclean hands in this case.
Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John Roberts, Justice Elena Kagan, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Justice Amy Comey Barrett, and retired Justice Anthony Kennedy attend US President Donald Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress on March 4, 2025 in Washington, DC. (USA Today).
The implications of this Supreme Court ruling are cataclysmic. The highest court in the land has allowed the government to deport immigrants to countries they are not associated with and, certainly most strikingly, without an opportunity to challenge the deportation in court. As Sotomayor put it: “Apparently, the Court finds the idea that thousands will suffer violence in farflung locales more palatable than the remote possibility that a District Court exceeded its remedial powers when it ordered the Government to provide notice and process to which the plaintiffs are constitutionally and statutorily entitled.”
Less than a day after the Supreme Court issued its ruling, Judge Murphy said that the Supreme Court’s ruling does not affect the immigrants in Djibouti who are en route to South Sudan. The government has claimed that Judge Murphy is defying the Supreme Court’s ruling. It appears likely that the Supreme Court will have to clarify their ruling since they ruled on the stay via the shadow docket. But for now, all future deportations could involve the government giving little or no notice to immigrants before deporting them to a ‘third country.’