Ketanji Brown Jackson Issues Seething Dissent To Supreme Court’s Hasty Migrant Ruling
Opinion by Lydia O'Connor
• 8h•
2 min read
Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson issued a seething dissent Monday to the court’s
ruling allowing the Trump administration to use an 18th-century wartime law to deport Venezuelan migrants.
“The President of the United States has invoked a centuries-old wartime statute to whisk people away to a notoriously brutal, foreign-run prison,” wrote the court’s newest justice. “For lovers of liberty, this should be quite concerning.”
The statute in question is the rarely used Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which President Franklin Roosevelt invoked in 1941 to justify the incarceration of Japanese Americans in camps during World War II. The Supreme Court upheld the incarceration three years later when it ruled in
Korematsu v. United States. It took the court nearly 75 years to
admit that was a “gravely wrong” mistake.
What’s especially concerning, Jackson wrote regarding the current deportation case, is that the conservative-dominated Supreme Court ruled under its emergency docket, or “
shadow docket,” without hearing any arguments or reviewing any briefings.
“At least when the Court went off base in the past, it left a record so posterity could see how it went wrong,” Jackson wrote, pointing to the
Korematsu ruling.
“With more and more of our most significant rulings taking place in the shadows of our emergency docket, today’s Court leaves less and less of a trace,” she continued. “But make no mistake: We are just as wrong now as we have been in the past, with similarly devastating consequences. It just seems we are now less willing to face it.”
Jackson argued that it sets a dangerous precedent that the court quickly struck down the injunction from U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg, whose earlier ruling put a temporary halt on such deportations and ordered planeloads of Venezuelan migrants be returned to the United States. The Trump administration has claimed the migrants are dangerous gang members — without providing specific evidence — while lawyers for a number of the men have said they have
no criminal history. Some were allegedly detained and sent to a notorious El Savladoran prison solely because they
have tattoos.
“Surely, the question whether such Government action is consistent with our Constitution and laws warrants considerable thought and attention from the Judiciary,” Jackson wrote, adding: “But this Court now sees fit to intervene, hastily dashing off a four-paragraph per curiam opinion discarding the District Court’s order based solely on a new legal pronouncement that, one might have thought, would require significant deliberation.”
The court has gotten too comfortable moving forward with shadow docket rulings, she said.
“I lament that the Court appears to have embarked on a new era of procedural variability, and that it has done so in such a casual, inequitable, and, in my view, inappropriate manner,” Jackson wrote.
