Supreme Court 6-3 stayed order requiring torture screening before third-country deportations, enabling removals to South Sudan and Libya
The Supreme Court voted 6-3 on June 23, 2025, to stay a federal district court order that had required the Trump administration to provide immigrants a meaningful opportunity to contest removal to dangerous third countries before deportation. The stay immediately allowed the administration to resume removals to South Sudan, Libya, and El Salvador under bilateral agreements, without any screening for Convention Against Torture claims. Justice Sotomayor dissented sharply, writing that the administration had "repeatedly defied" the lower court order and calling the Supreme Court's intervention "so gross an abuse of the Court's equitable discretion."