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The US Supreme Court has permitted the Trump administration to keep sending immigrants to third countries, staying a lower-court ruling that had halted such removals over due process concerns. The high court granted the administration's emergency request on Tuesday, clearing the way for deportations of people to countries to which they may have no connection at all to resume.
Third-country deportations, as the practice is known, allow the government to remove individuals whose own countries are unwilling to accept them back. The administration has dramatically expanded the policy since Donald Trump returned to office in 2025, after campaigning on a pledge to carry out the "largest deportation operation in American history." Officials have defended the removals as a necessary tool for dealing with migrants who have no country willing to take them in.
The order issued by the court was unsigned, which is standard practice for emergency petitions, and it came without any explanation of the reasoning or a breakdown of how the justices voted. At the bottom of the document, however, the court's three left-leaning members — Sonia Sotomayor, Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan — made clear they would have refused the administration's request.
The ruling is only a temporary reprieve for the administration's broader legal strategy. The order sets oral arguments for December, at a time when the administration is continuing its appeal of the underlying decision handed down by Judge Brian Murphy in Boston, Massachusetts. Murphy had ruled that immigrants must be given a "meaningful" opportunity to raise safety concerns before being removed to a third country.
In pausing the removals, Murphy indicated that some immigrants may have been denied the chance to challenge their deportation as part of their due process rights. That reasoning placed the government's practice squarely in conflict with a core constitutional guarantee, and it is the question now travelling to the Supreme Court.
The court's intervention arrives in a legal environment that has repeatedly tested the boundaries of executive immigration power. Tuesday's action was not the first time the justices have weighed in on forcibly sending people to third countries. In June 2025, the Supreme Court issued a similarly unsigned order allowing such removals to proceed. That decision cleared the way for eight men — including nationals of Cuba, Myanmar and Vietnam — to be deported to South Sudan, a country the US State Department advises against visiting because of "crime, kidnapping, and armed conflict."
At the time, the Department of Homeland Security described the removals as "a win." Rights groups said the move flouted basic legal protections. Critics have expressed concern that many of the governments receiving third-country deportations have their own record of human rights abuses, raising the question of what protection, if any, deportees can expect once they arrive.
Advocates make a further point about the mechanics of the policy: third-country deportations have been used to bypass court protection orders that would otherwise prevent immigrants from being sent back to their home countries because of fears of persecution. Some of those third-party countries, advocates say, have ultimately sent deportees — including asylum seekers — onward to the very places they had fled, where they feared they would face torture or other harm.
The scale of the programme has grown rapidly. At least 35 countries have signed agreements with the Trump administration to take in third-country nationals, according to a tally by the nonprofits Refugees International and Human Rights First. Those groups estimate that more than 25,000 people have been subject to third-country deportations so far.
International pressure has been building alongside those numbers. On Monday, human rights experts at the United Nations wrote to the US government urging it to halt such removals, warning that they were placing deportees at heightened risk of abuse. "At gravest risk are children, women, persons with disabilities, victims of trafficking, LGBT persons, human rights defenders, stateless persons and other people in extremely vulnerable situations," the experts said.
At the same time, the administration has continued to expand the network of agreements. On Tuesday, Burundi became the latest country to sign on to take non-citizen deportees. Officials in Burundi said the country would only accept people who were not facing prosecution and who had no links to "terrorism."
On the ground, the debate is playing out in detention facilities. Demonstrators placed flowers outside the Adelanto Ice Processing Center in Adelanto, California, on Tuesday, at the start of a march to the Metropolitan Detention Center in Los Angeles. The protesters were calling for the closure of the facility and an end to what they described as inhumane conditions and deaths in detention centres.
What December's argument will decide is not abstract. The stay means removals can continue during the months ahead, and any person deported in the interim may be effectively beyond the reach of American courts. The justices will also have to weigh Murphy's "meaningful opportunity" standard against the administration's interest in removing people quickly, in a case with clear echoes of earlier disputes over the scope of presidential immigration authority. For now, the order keeps a signature campaign promise moving forward — but leaves its legality unsettled until the court speaks in full.
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