Supreme Court Clears Path for Trump to Resume Third-Country Deportations

The US Supreme Court has permitted the Trump administration to resume third-country deportations, staying a lower-court ruling that had frozen the removals over questions of due process. In an order issued on Tuesday, the high court granted the administration's emergency request to move forward with sending immigrants to countries to which they may have no connection.

Third-country removals have become a signature feature of the administration's immigration agenda, allowing officials to relocate people to nations other than their own even when those individuals may have never set foot in, or applied to, the receiving country. The practice has drawn fierce legal and humanitarian criticism, and its expansion has been tied up in litigation since Trump returned to office in 2025.

The court's order was unsigned, which is typical for emergency petitions, and it offered no reasoning. Notably, it also did not disclose how the justices voted. At the bottom of the order, however, the court's three left-leaning members — Sonia Sotomayor, Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan — signalled that they would have turned down the administration's request, a rare public indication of a split among the justices before full argument in the case.

The ruling is explicitly temporary. The order directs the court to hear arguments in December, giving the administration a window of time to continue removals while the underlying appeal proceeds. It therefore operates as a pause in a lower-court decision rather than a final resolution of whether the removals are lawful.

The litigation stems from a ruling by Judge Brian Murphy, based in Boston, Massachusetts. Murphy held that immigrants must be afforded a "meaningful" opportunity to raise safety concerns before being removed to third-party countries. In halting the removals, the judge indicated that some individuals had been stripped of the chance to challenge their deportation, a right the order treated as part of their due process protections.

The administration's defence of the program rests on the argument that certain individuals cannot be returned to their countries of origin because those governments are unwilling to accept them. Trump campaigned on a pledge to carry out the "largest deportation operation in American history", and officials have used third-country transfers to make good on that promise for people their own country has declined to take back.

The justices have weighed in before. In June 2025, the Supreme Court issued an unsigned order allowing such removals to proceed, clearing 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 Americans against visiting because of "crime, kidnapping, and armed conflict." At the time, the Department of Homeland Security described the removals as a win, while rights groups said the move flouted basic legal protections.

Critics maintain that many of the governments now receiving deportees have their own records of human rights abuses. They argue that third-country transfers have been used to sidestep court protection orders designed to prevent immigrants from being sent back to their home countries out of well-founded fears of persecution. Advocates add that some receiving states have themselves subsequently moved deportees onward, including asylum seekers, to places they had fled for fear of torture or other grave harm.

The scale of the programme has grown rapidly. According to a tally compiled by the nonprofits Refugees International and Human Rights First, at least 35 countries have signed agreements with the Trump administration to accept third-country nationals, and the groups estimate that more than 25,000 people have already been subject to such deportations.

International pressure has been mounting in parallel. On Monday, human rights experts at the United Nations wrote to the US government urging it to halt the removals, warning that they were exposing deportees to a heightened risk of abuse. The experts said those "at gravest risk" include children, women, persons with disabilities, victims of trafficking, LGBT people, human rights defenders, stateless persons and others living in extremely vulnerable circumstances.

The administration's momentum continued on the same day as the court order. Burundi became the latest country to sign an agreement with the United States to take in non-citizen deportees. According to officials, the country will only accept individuals who are not facing prosecution and who have no links to "terrorism" — conditions reflecting Burundi's own recent history of instability and concern over extremist networks.

What lies ahead is the December argument, where the administration will have to justify the programme against Murphy's contention that migrants deserve a meaningful chance to voice safety concerns before being shipped abroad. For now, the practical effect of the high court's intervention is that removals continue while the question of their constitutionality remains unsettled — a delay that rights advocates are unlikely to regard as a resolution of the underlying humanitarian concerns they have raised.