Supreme Court 6-3 stayed order requiring torture screening before third-country deportations, enabling removals to South Sudan and Libya

On June 23, 2025, the Supreme Court voted 6-3 to stay a federal district court order that had required the Trump administration to give immigrants a "meaningful opportunity" to raise claims under the Convention Against Torture before being removed to third countries — nations where they have no prior connection and where they may face persecution, torture, or death. The unsigned order allowed the administration to immediately resume deportations to South Sudan, Libya, and El Salvador under bilateral removal agreements, halting the procedural safeguard before any merits ruling on the underlying constitutional question.

The district court order had been issued after the Trump administration entered agreements with South Sudan, Libya, El Salvador, and other countries to accept deportees of other nationalities, circumventing the ordinary rule that people subject to removal can contest the country of removal. Human rights lawyers argued that many deportees had no ties to the destination countries and could face serious harm; several had existing protections against deportation to their home countries that the third-country route was designed to bypass. The administration defied the district court order before the Supreme Court stepped in, a fact Justice Sotomayor noted explicitly in her dissent.

Justice Sotomayor, joined by Justices Kagan and Jackson, dissented sharply. She wrote that the majority had intervened despite the administration having "repeatedly defied" the lower court's directives and called the Court's grant of the stay "so gross an abuse of the Court's equitable discretion" as to amount to enabling the very defiance the district court had tried to stop. The ruling was the first in a trilogy of June 2025 Supreme Court decisions — alongside the AEA-Venezuela deportation stay and Trump v. CASA (June 27) — that collectively reduced judicial oversight of executive immigration enforcement during the final days of the Court's 2024–2025 term.