Another activist judge’s efforts to curtail President Donald Trump’s immigration agenda have been stymied by a superior court. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit on Monday struck down an order from Judge Brian Murphy of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts which would have barred the Trump administration from deporting illegal immigrants to “third countries” in cases where either the deportee fights being deported to his home country or his home country’s government will not facilitate his repatriation.

Murphy issued his order late last month, accusing the administration of attempting to deport illegal immigrants “to the wrong country, or a country where [an illegal immigrant] is likely to be persecuted, or tortured, thereby depriving that person of the opportunity to seek protections to which he would be undisputedly entitled.” At the crux of Murphy’s argument was the assertion that illegal immigrants being deported to third countries will possibly face persecution or death in those third countries. “These are our laws, and it is with profound gratitude for the unbelievable luck of being born in the United States of America that this Court affirms these and our nation’s bedrock principle: that no person in this country may be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,” the judge wrote (internal quotation marks omitted). The third country deportation policy, Murphy averred, “fails to satisfy due process for a raft of reasons…”

The Trump administration promptly filed an emergency motion for a stay of Murphy’s order pending appeal with the appellate court. Circuit judges Seth Aframe, appointed by former President Joe Biden, and Jeffrey R. Howard, appointed by former President George W. Bush, sided with the Trump administration, while Biden appointee Lara Montecalvo would have denied the administration’s request. The stay means that the administration can, at least for now, continue deporting illegal immigrants to designated third countries.

In comments to The Washington Stand, Jessica Vaughan, director of Policy Studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, explained the significance of the stay. “This is an important ruling in several ways. First, the problem of recalcitrant countries who refuse to take their citizens back has bedeviled immigration enforcement for many years,” she said. “When countries refuse to live up to this international obligation, it means that Americans are stuck with the illegal aliens that ICE is trying to remove, most of whom have been criminals.” She added, “It is absurd that our country has allowed other governments to have this leverage for so long. Previous administrations hesitated to push back, avoiding visa sanctions or other ways to get countries to cooperate.”

“Another problem has been deportable aliens who are able to convince an immigration judge that, even though they don’t qualify to remain here, they should not be sent back to their home country for fear of mistreatment, enabling them to stay,” Vaughan observed. “The Trump administration said, ‘Enough,’ and decided that if aliens are ordered removed, they should actually leave, and signed agreements with different countries to take them. This was a brilliant move,” she continued. “The way it has played out in practice, often the deportees agree to go home from the third country, just not from the United States, avoiding the international political gamesmanship. Or, they start a new life there,” Vaughan noted. “Importantly, the prospect of removal to an unfamiliar country, which may not have as lenient immigration or criminal laws as the United States, is so unappealing to the deportees that they abandon efforts to block or appeal deportation to their own country because the alternative is worse. This exposes how bogus some of the claims of feared mistreatment are in real life.”

“Finally,” Vaughan said, “this ruling is another slap-down of a rogue federal judge who was primarily interested in interfering with immigration enforcement, creating new rights for deportable aliens, and blocking a Trump initiative, rather than ruling on a legitimate constitutional principle.”

While the case has not made its way in full to the U.S. Supreme Court, the high court did halt a preliminary order from Murphy to the same effect, allowing the Trump administration to transfer a gang of illegal immigrants from a detention center in Djibouti to a third country: South Sudan. Under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), the majority of the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS’s) deportation-related decisions are shielded from judicial review, leading lower court judges like Murphy to zero in on “due process” arguments, charging the administration with providing illegal immigrants slated for deportation too little time to challenge their detentions or deportations in court.