Justice Amy Coney Barrett listens as President Donald Trump addresses a joint session of Congress at the Capitol in Washington, Tuesday, March 4, 2025 (Win McNamee/Pool Photo via AP).
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday vacated a lower court’s temporary restraining orders which had prohibited the Trump administration from deporting Venezuelan migrants through its unprecedented invocation of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.
While all nine justices agreed that any individual detained under the wartime authority must be afforded notice and due process of law — a clear setback for Trump’s plan to fast-track removals — the most surprising vote was cast by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who once again threw her lot in with the court’s liberal bloc by joining parts of Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent. It is not the first time the Trump-appointed justice had spurned the court’s conservative block — a point that was not lost on the MAGA faithful who cheered her nomination years ago.
In the 5-4 decision on the emergency application, the court ruled on procedural grounds. The majority held that the five Venezuelan plaintiffs should have brought their case as individual habeas corpus petitions in Texas, where they are being held, not Washington, D.C., where they originally filed the class action suit under the Administrative Procedures Act (APA). Habeas petitions involve detainees challenging the legality of their custody and typically seeking to be released.
In a scathing dissent, Sotomayor excoriated the Trump administration for failing to comply with court orders and ignoring its “obligations to the rule of law” and harangued the majority for even intervening in the case at all, saying the decision was “as inexplicable as it is dangerous.” But Barrett shrewdly avoided joining the more harshly-worded portions of Sotomayor’s dissent, only joining the most senior liberal justice in parts II and III-B.
Part II briefly reiterates that all migrants are entitled to due process prior to removal under the AEA, largely agreeing with the majority on the constitutional issue.
In part III-B, Sotomayor asserts the majority’s conclusion that challenges to removals under the AEA must be filed as habeas petitions is “dubious.” She emphasizes that habeas corpus is “at its core, an avenue for a person in custody to ‘attack … the legality of the custody’ and ‘to secure release from illegal custody.”” However, the plaintiffs in this case did not challenge their detention, they only sought “to protect themselves from summary deportation.”
Sotomayor goes on to argue that the court jumped the gun by barring the defendants from brining suit under the APA without allowing both sides to more fully develop their arguments.
“Against that backdrop, there is every reason to question the majority’s hurried conclusion that habeas relief supplies the exclusive means to challenge removal under the Alien Enemies Act. At the very least, the question is a thorny one, and this emergency application was not the place to resolve it. Nor was it the Court’s last chance to weigh in,” Sotomayor wrote in III-B. “In its rush to decide the issue now, the Court halts the lower court’s work and forces us to decide the matter after mere days of deliberation and without adequate time to weigh the parties’ arguments or the full record of the District Court’s proceedings.”
Notably, Barrett chose not to join Sotomayor’s biting conclusion, in which she states that the Trump administration’s actions in the litigation “poses an extraordinary threat to the rule of law” and denounces the majority for rewarding such behavior.
Despite remaining largely removed from the more contentious portions of the case, Barrett’s vote left Trump supporters fuming.
For example, Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, responded to a post on X, formerly Twitter, about Barrett siding with the court’s three liberals, writing, “This is disappointing.” Elon Musk then responded to Lee, writing, “Suicidal empathy is a civilizational risk.”
The online MAGA personality “Catturd,” who has more than 3.5 million followers on X, posted the following:
“There’s nobody I have less respect for in the entire country besides Dr. Fauci than Amy Commie Barrett – Trump appointed her and gave her her dream job and complimented her and praised her – and she’s been an ungrateful, backstabbing POS since day one. She got a million dollar Liberal book deal within weeks and her whole goal in Life is to be praised by The New York Times. Weak, coward, sellout, fraud. She’s everything that’s wrong with this country. She’s an Absolute disgusting fraud.”
It is not the first time conservatives and MAGA faithfuls have expressed frustration with Barrett for failing to fall in line with Trump. Last month she sparked outrage when she and Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the three liberals in refusing the Trump administration’s request to halt a federal judge’s order requiring the government to pay out nearly $2 billion in foreign aid.
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