Supreme Court temporarily blocks deportations to El Salvador
By 
This could be big:
The Supreme Court temporarily blocked the Trump administration early Saturday from deporting another group of Venezuelan migrants accused of being gang members under the expansive powers of a rarely invoked wartime law.
“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 court said in a brief, unsigned order that gave no reasoning, as is typical in emergency cases.
Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. dissented. The White House did not issue any immediate response.
More than 50 Venezuelans were scheduled to be flown out of the country — presumably to El Salvador — from an immigration detention center in Anson, Texas, according to two people with knowledge of the situation. The American Civil Liberties Union in recent days had already secured court orders barring similar deportations under the law, the Alien Enemies Act, in other places including New York, Denver and Brownsville, Texas.
The situation in Anson was urgent enough that A.C.L.U. lawyers mounted challenges in three different courts within five hours on Friday.
The lawyers started with an emergency filing in Federal District Court in Abilene, Texas, in which they claimed that officers at the Bluebonnet Detention Center in Anson had started distributing notices to Venezuelan immigrants informing them that they could face deportation as soon as Friday night.
They asked Judge James Wesley Hendrix, who is overseeing the case, to issue an immediate order protecting all migrants in the Northern District of Texas who might face deportation under the Alien Enemies Act. When Judge Hendrix did not grant their request quickly — and later rejected it entirely — the lawyers filed a similar request to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans.
The lawyers then filed an emergency petition to the Supreme Court, asking the justices to step in and issue an immediate pause on any deportations because many of the Venezuelan men had “already been loaded on to buses, presumably headed to the airport.”
“These men were close to spending their lives in a horrific foreign prison without ever having had any due process,” Lee Gelernt, the lead A.C.L.U. attorney on the case, said on Saturday. “The case has a long way to go. But for now, we are relieved that the court has not allowed the Trump administration to hurry them away in secret.”
Thomas and Alito are past praying for, but it’s possible that at least two out of the six Good Germans on the SCOTUS are willing to in at least this instance stand up to the Trump administration.
. . . Excellent breakdown here from Steve Vladeck:
As Vladeck suggests, the SCOTUS is approaching the point where it’s going to have to rule on the substantive question of whether the Trump administration can abuse the AEA in this way, instead of hiding behind endless procedural obfuscation of that question.