Justices allow third-country deportations as case proceeds

Michael Macagnone, CQ-Roll Call on Sep 29, 2026

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WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration on Tuesday to continue to deport immigrants to countries other than those they came from, known as third-country removals, in an order that also set up a final legal fight over the practice.

Tuesday’s order lifted a lower-court order blocking the practice, which the Trump administration has sought to use to speed deportations. The administration has used the policy to deport thousands of immigrants to countries such as El Salvador, Libya and South Sudan, according to court records.

The order also set the case for arguments in December over whether the immigrants had the right to sue and the power of the lower court to stop the policy, as well as the constitutionality of the policy itself — placing the justices at the center of one of the president’s most prominent priorities.

Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson would have denied a stay, according to the order, but did not write separately to dissent.

The third-country removal practice — where immigrants can be deported to a country other than one on their removal order, which is most commonly their home nation — kicked into a new gear shortly after Trump was sworn in for his second term.

The federal law allowing those third-country removals requires that the government ensure immigrants will not be tortured or face persecution at their destination, according to court documents. The Trump administration argued that a set of agreements with the destination countries, which include blanket assurances that the immigrants will not be tortured, should be enough for the courts.

Going further than that, the administration said, jammed up the delicate foreign policy negotiations around getting countries to accept those immigrants.

“The decision that a foreign government’s categorial assurance against torture or persecution is sufficient for all aliens is itself a ‘foreign policy’ judgment the Judiciary ‘is not suited’ to question,” the administration’s Supreme Court application said.

The Trump administration has argued that the practice is used on the “worst of the worst” offenders whose home countries refuse to take them back. In its Supreme Court filing last week, the administration argued that thousands of immigrants have been deported this way and that requiring additional hearings, beyond those needed to deport the immigrant at all, would slow or derail the deportation process.

“Meanwhile, the very aliens whose removal is most urgent, including those who have committed serious crimes like murder, attempted murder, rape, child rape, kidnapping, and aggravated assault, will be allowed to remain — and often will be released (given practical and legal constraints on detention), to the peril of law-abiding Americans,” the administration’s Supreme Court brief said.

The lower-court ruling, from Judge Brian Murphy of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, found that the third-country removal policy violated the rights of immigrants because it did not allow them a hearing over whether they could possibly face torture or persecution in that third country.

“Denying a stay does not prevent third-country removals; rather, it simply requires them to do so lawfully,” the Supreme Court filing for the immigrants who challenged the policy said.

The Trump administration has sought Supreme Court intervention multiple times in the case previously, including to allow the deportation of eight men to South Sudan. In both prior instances the justices sided with the Trump administration to let the deportations proceed while the case worked its way through the courts.

The case hit an inflection point last week when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit upheld Murphy’s ruling that the law required more process than the administration had provided.

Now Tuesday’s order paused the 1st Circuit’s ruling and set the underlying policy up for a possible final test of its legality.

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