The Trump administration deported 15,000 people to third countries in 2025 alone. On Monday, the Supreme Court said it can keep going.
The open-borders legal strategy just ran out of courtrooms.
The Court's unsigned ruling lifted a lower-court injunction that had temporarily blocked the administration's policy of deporting illegal immigrants to countries other than their country of origin. The decision was immediate, restoring operational flexibility to ICE while the justices agreed to hear full oral arguments in December. Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.
Third-country deportation solves a specific problem the left doesn't like to talk about. Cuba won't take its people back. Venezuela refuses repatriation. India and China are slow-walkers. Under the old framework, an illegal immigrant from a non-cooperative country could fight deportation indefinitely because there was nowhere to send them. Under this policy, the government identifies a willing third country — from a list of 29 nations — and the flight leaves on schedule.
James Percival, the top lawyer at the Department of Homeland Security, called it "a bad day for criminal illegals and open borders activists alike." He added: "It's not too late to get $3,000 and a flight home." The $3,000 is the administration's standing offer for voluntary departure — a detail that tends to vanish from the coverage that frames this as cruelty.
The legal challenge began with four noncitizens who filed a class-action lawsuit in March 2025, arguing that deportees were entitled to individualized hearings before being sent to a third country. U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy in Massachusetts agreed, ruling that affected immigrants must receive "meaningful notice before removal to any third country" and an opportunity to raise fears of persecution. The 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals largely affirmed Murphy's ruling on September 18.
Eleven days later, the Supreme Court overrode both of them.
Solicitor General D. John Sauer argued to the Court that the lower-court injunction "created substantial logistical problems" and "led to added expense." Translation: every day the policy was frozen, deportation flights were being canceled and detention costs were climbing. NBC News reported one scheduled flight carrying 70 people was scrapped because of the injunction.
Trina Realmuto of the National Immigration Litigation Alliance — representing the plaintiffs — warned that the ruling has "an enormous consequence for people whose lives and safety are on the line." The December oral arguments will determine whether the policy survives permanently or gets struck down.
But the trajectory is hard to miss. The administration built a deportation pipeline to 29 countries, moved 15,000 people through it in a single year, and just got the highest court in the country to let it keep running. The majority of those flights went to Mexico, as reported by Hot Air, but the list includes countries the left never anticipated: Rwanda, South Sudan, Costa Rica, Honduras, Equatorial Guinea, and the Central African Republic.
The dissenting justices wrote that the policy raises serious due-process concerns. The majority didn't write anything at all. They just lifted the injunction.
Fifteen thousand deportees. Twenty-nine countries. Three dissenting justices. The math is settled even if the law isn't — yet.
