Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has historically disagreed with President Donald Trump — and now Trump is trying to do an end-run around her in a key case over whether immigrants can be deported to countries other than their nation of origin.
“The Justice Department’s emergency filing at the Supreme Court on Thursday also contains an unusual request,” reported Politico’s Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney on Thursday. “Under the court’s announced assignments, emergency appeals from the 1st Circuit are directed to Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.”
The Politico journalists added, “Sauer’s submission says that if Jackson doesn’t immediately grant the stay the administration is seeking, it wants that matter referred to the full court for action. The language suggests that DOJ lawyers think Jackson may simply give immigrant rights advocates a few days to respond and leave the lower-court rulings in effect in the meantime, but the full court could be more receptive to the administration’s claims of urgency.”
To justify this decision, Attorney General Todd Blanche, wrote that “without even allowing the government a chance to respond, and in the dark of night, a federal appeals court blocked us from conducting all third-country removals of illegal aliens, an entirely legal and invaluable tool to stem the tide of illegal immigration.” Yet Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, contradicted Blanche’s assertion.
“This is FALSE,” Reichlin-Melnick posted on X. “The government has NOT been barred from doing third-country removals. ICE has been barred from doing so 1) without telling people before they’re on the plane, and 2) without letting them raise fears of persecution/torture.”
Reichlin-Melnick then quoted the germane portion of the court decision in question.
“The final judgment contains five declarations that, together, construe applicable law to require DHS to take three actions when executing third-country removals that are not contemplated by the Guidance,” the decision said. “(1) to seek first to remove class members to countries they have designated or of which they are subjects, nationals, or citizens; (2) to provide class members with effective notice of DHS’s intention to remove them to a specified third country; and (3) to provide class members with a meaningful opportunity to contest removal to that third country on the ground that they have a reasonable fear of being persecuted or tortured there. See 28 U.S.C. § 2201(a).”
It is not surprising that the Trump administration would not want to avoid Jackson. In 2025 she famously denounced the Supreme Court’s tendency to side with Trump, even when doing so required them to be ideologically inconsistent, as “Calvinball” jurisprudence because “Calvinball has only one rule: There are no fixed rules. We seem to have two: that one, and this Administration always wins.”
Even when the court has rarely opposed Trump, Jackson has spoken out against its pro-Trump wing, such as when she pointed out the judges like Clarence Thomas willing to overturn birthright citizenship were “ow surprisingly suggests that the Citizenship Clause was a race-conscious remedial measure, relating only to ‘freed slaves such as Dred Scott,’ post, at 56, and those who shared with them certain characteristics,” even though on other occasions they have downplayed or denied the role of racism in shaping the United States.