Trump v. J. G. G.

Majority reasoning

The Court reasoned that challenges to removal under the Alien Enemies Act — a statute that largely limits judicial review — must be brought through habeas corpus, the traditional legal tool for contesting confinement, rather than through other types of lawsuits. Because the detainees' claims, even if not formally requesting release, necessarily challenge the validity of their confinement and removal under the Act, they fall within the core of what habeas corpus is designed to address. For habeas petitions, the law requires that the case be filed in the district where the person is held, and because the detainees are confined in Texas, the Washington, D.C. court was the wrong venue. The Court also confirmed that the Fifth Amendment's due process guarantee requires that detainees receive notice — after the date of this ruling — that they are subject to removal, with enough time to actually file a habeas petition in the correct court before removal occurs. The majority emphasized that all nine Justices agree detainees are entitled to judicial review; the only disagreement is about which court should provide it.

Dissent reasoning

Justice Sotomayor, joined by Justices Kagan and Jackson (and Justice Barrett on parts of the dissent), argued that the Court should not have intervened at all, given that a full preliminary injunction hearing was already scheduled for the very next day in the lower court. The dissent questioned whether the Court even had jurisdiction to review the temporary restraining orders, which are generally not appealable and were nearly expired. On the merits, the dissent argued that the majority's conclusion — that these claims must be brought in habeas — is legally dubious, because the detainees were not challenging their underlying detention but only seeking to stop their deportation under the Proclamation; habeas corpus has traditionally been used to challenge the legality of custody itself, not to block a separate removal action. The dissent also argued that forcing hundreds of detainees to file individual habeas petitions in scattered courts across the country, rather than proceeding as a class, exposes them to severe and potentially irreversible harm, including removal to a Salvadoran prison where conditions are described as life-threatening and from which the government says it cannot retrieve people. Finally, the dissent argued that the Court should not have granted the government discretionary equitable relief given the government's own conduct — including moving detainees onto planes before the Proclamation was even published and allegedly defying the lower court's order to return planes already in flight — which the dissent said violated the legal principle that a party seeking court relief must come to court having acted fairly.