DHS Asks Supreme Court to Clear Way for South Sudan Deportations

The Department of Homeland Security said a new federal district court order delaying the removals is a ‘lawless act of defiance.’

The Supreme Court building in Washington on June 3, 2025. Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) asked the Supreme Court on June 24 to clarify its emergency order from the day before that temporarily allowed the government to deport illegal immigrants to third countries to which they have no connection.

In the new filing in the case known as DHS v. D.V.D, the DHS said it was not clear whether the brief order that the high court issued on June 23 covered the eight men that the government intends to remove to South Sudan. According to DHS, the men, who are currently being detained at a U.S. military facility in Djibouti, are “criminal aliens.”

In the Supreme Court’s 6–3 ruling on June 23, three justices—Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson—dissented.

Sotomayor wrote that the government has wrongfully deported plaintiffs to South Sudan, “a nation the State Department considers too unsafe for all but its most critical personnel.”

In a previous filing in May, the DHS recounted a federal district court’s preliminary injunction on April 18 that it said blocked DHS “from exercising its undisputed statutory authority to remove an alien to a country not specifically identified in his removal order (i.e., a ‘third country’), unless DHS first satisfies an onerous set of procedures invented by the district court to assess any potential claim under the Convention Against Torture ... no matter how facially implausible.”

The procedures spelled out in the court order issued by Judge Brian Murphy of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts “usurped the president’s authority over immigration policy” and “are currently wreaking havoc on the third-country removal process,” DHS stated in the May filing.

In the DHS’s new filing on June 24, the department said that hours after the Supreme Court acted late on June 23, the district court issued an order stating that one of its rulings enforcing its injunction “remains in full force and effect” despite the Supreme Court’s ruling.

The district court order would prevent the government from acting and “is a lawless act of defiance, that, once again, disrupts sensitive diplomatic relations and slams the brakes on the Executive’s lawful efforts to effectuate third-country removals,” DHS argued in the new filing.

The ruling that Murphy said was still in effect was issued on May 21. That order stated that six of the individuals being held in Djibouti cannot immediately be deported. Each of them must be given due process, including an interview to determine if they have a reasonable fear of persecution and access to counsel, according to the order.

Meanwhile, attorneys for the detainees filed a brief with the Supreme Court late on June 24 stating that the “lives and safety” of the eight men involved in the case “are at imminent risk.”

The brief confirmed that the individuals are being detained at a U.S. naval base in Djibouti and said Murphy’s May 21 order “is the only shield that preserves and protects their statutory, regulatory, and due process rights to seek protection from torture in South Sudan.”