The Supreme Court ruled Monday that the Venezuelan immigrants accused of belonging to a gang and slated for deportation by the Trump administration have the right to a judicial hearing before they can be sent out of the country.
The court split 5-4 on where the hearings should be held and under what legal principle. The conservatives, minus Justice Amy Coney Barrett, said the Venezuelans must file petitions for habeas corpus in Texas, where they are being held. Barrett and the three liberal justices would have allowed the detainees’ lawsuit to continue in Washington, D.C., where it was filed. Either way, the men will get their day in court to argue that it is unlawful to deport them under the Alien Enemies Act.
The most important thing to understand about the court’s decision is that it vindicates the rule of law. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor emphasized in her dissent, “all nine Members of this court agree” that the detainees must have judicial review.
Sotomayor warned the Trump administration that under the ruling, “the government cannot usher any detainees, including plaintiffs, onto planes in a shroud of secrecy, as it did on March 15, 2025.” The date was a reference to some 261 Venezuelans who were sent to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador despite an oral ruling from the bench by a federal judge stating they could not be deported and that planes carrying them must be turned around.
She added that the Trump administration could not take advantage of any gap between the court’s rejection of the D.C. case and the initiation of habeas proceedings in Texas to try to kick out the Venezuelans, “as it promised the D.C. Circuit it would do.”
In a section of the dissent that Barrett didn’t join, Sotomayor also criticized the majority for disregarding “the Government’s attempts to subvert the judicial process throughout this litigation.”
Another reason the split matters is how the case got to federal court in Washington in the first place. Concerned they were about to be detained and deported based on the Alien Enemies Act, the immigrants went to court before they were grabbed. At that point, they didn’t know where they would be detained en route out of the country. And they were smart to do so.
Both the majority and dissent agreed that for now, the court would not address the underlying question of whether the deportations are legal. But the majority did drop an ominous hint. The unsigned opinion noted that the act “largely precludes judicial review.”
As a matter of law, this sentence does not dictate that the conservatives will ultimately uphold the use of the Alien Enemies Act. Formally speaking, if the law cannot be used to deport people from countries with whom we aren’t at war, judicial review would still be necessary to vindicate their due process rights.
Chief Justice John Roberts, who joined the conservatives, might conceivably still block such deportations when the issue eventually does reach the Supreme Court. Yet Roberts likes to use what he considers prudence to avoid overturning executive action. He could try to avoid confrontation with the Trump administration by ultimately holding that the court cannot ask, under the law, whether the U.S. is actually at war with the enemy. The language of judicial restraint used here (“largely precludes judicial review”) could foreshadow that result.
Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and a law professor at Harvard University.
