After weeks of controversy, the U.S. Supreme Court is siding with President Donald Trump against sweeping restrictions imposed by inferior courts.

The president invoked the Alien Enemies Act (AEA) of 1798 last month, using the broad authorities provided to him to quickly arrest, detain, and deport noncitizens affiliated with the foreign terrorist organization Tren de Aragua (TdA). Within hours, however, a group of five Venezuelan nationals slated for deportation went to court and Judge James Boasberg of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia issued a temporary restraining order (TRO) barring the president from summarily deporting TdA members and affiliates under the auspices of the AEA.

When Boasberg refused to dissolve the order, the president sought relief from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Two of the three judges on the circuit court upheld Boasberg’s TRO, demanding only that he amend it so as not to enjoin the president himself, only Trump administration officials and deputies. Thus, the president asked the Supreme Court to intervene. The chief argument put forth by the Trump administration was that the Venezuelan nationals who had filed a complaint against the president’s use of the AEA incorrectly did so on the grounds of the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), when they should have filed a habeas corpus petition in the jurisdiction in which they were detained, in Texas.

“Most fundamentally, respondents cannot obtain relief because they brought the wrong claims in the wrong court,” wrote Acting U.S. Solicitor General Sarah Harris in the Trump administration’s petition to the Supreme Court. She continued, “[B]y insisting on proceeding with APA claims in the District of Columbia — not individual habeas proceedings in the Southern District of Texas — respondents are depriving the proper forum of the chance to flesh out the scope of habeas review and to start resolving individual challenges in an orderly way.” Harris added, “By persisting with an unlawful class action, respondents also inflict accumulating harms on absent class members, who risk being estopped from pressing habeas claims by virtue of being part of this class action.”

“This case presents fundamental questions about who decides how to conduct sensitive national-security-related operations in this country — the President, through Article II, or the Judiciary, through TROs. The Constitution supplies a clear answer: the President. The republic cannot afford a different choice,” the Solicitor General insisted. She concluded, “A single district court cannot broadly disable the President from discharging his most fundamental duties, regardless of the order’s label, and irrespective of its duration. This Court should vacate this TRO, halt the tide of injunctions, and restore the constitutional balance.”

In an unsigned per curiam order issued Monday, the Supreme Court agreed with the president’s reasoning. “The detainees seek equitable relief against the implementation of the Proclamation and against their removal under the AEA. They challenge the Government’s interpretation of the Act and assert that they do not fall within the category of removable alien enemies. But we do not reach those arguments,” the Supreme Court wrote. It continued, “Challenges to removal under the AEA, a statute which largely ‘preclude[s] judicial review,’ … must be brought in habeas.”

Noting that the detained Venezuelan nationals did not challenge their detainment, only their deportation under the AEA, the Supreme Court wrote, “Regardless of whether the detainees formally request release from confinement, because their claims for relief ‘necessarily imply the invalidity’ of their confinement and removal under the AEA, their claims fall within the ‘core’ of the writ of habeas corpus and thus must be brought in habeas.” Therefore, the Supreme Court declared, “We grant the application and vacate the TROs.”

Although all nine Supreme Court justices evidently agreed that the president’s use of the AEA is subject to some form of “judicial review,” only five — Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, and Neil Gorsuch — reached the conclusion that the proper venue for that “judicial review” is in a habeas corpus petition brought in the district in which the complainant is detained. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a dissenting opinion, in which she was joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson and partly joined by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, whom Trump appointed to the court in his first term.

Sotomayor argued that, since the Venezuelan nationals did not challenge their detainment and only challenged their deportation under the AEA, a habeas corpus petition would be improper and an APA complaint was the correct course of action. The Trump administration’s “conduct in this litigation poses an extraordinary threat to the rule of law. That a majority of this Court now rewards the Government for its behavior with discretionary equitable relief is indefensible,” Sotomayor wrote. She concluded, “We, as a Nation and a court of law, should be better than this. I respectfully dissent.”

The president and his administration officials were quick to praise the Supreme Court’s decision to vacate Boasberg’s TROs. In a Truth Social post, the president wrote, “The Supreme Court has upheld the Rule of Law in our Nation by allowing a President, whoever that may be, to be able to secure our Borders, and protect our families and our Country, itself. A GREAT DAY FOR JUSTICE IN AMERICA!” Vice President J.D. Vance added, “The Supreme Court today rejected the idea that far left judges in DC can overrule President Trump’s immigration enforcement. This is a major loss for the lunatics and a major win for the American people.”

White House Deputy Chief of Staff and policy advisor Stephen Miller, credited as the chief architect of the president’s immigration agenda, commented, “ALIEN ENEMIES ACT NOW IN FULL EFFECT. THE FOREIGN TERRORISTS WILL BE ARRESTED AND EXPELLED.” He stated in a subsequent interview, “This was a huge, a monumental victory for President Trump, the biggest legal win of this administration so far, a total embarrassment for crazy Judge Boasberg, who’s been trying to force this president to bring foreign terrorist aliens back onto American soil. …” Miller continued, “Those monsters can now be hunted down and expelled from this country with speed, force, and efficiency. This is a great day for America.”

In a video reacting to the Supreme Court’s decision, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem said, “Today’s a bad day to be a terrorist in the United States of America.” She warned illegal immigrants, “LEAVE NOW or we will arrest you, lock you up and deport you.” Attorney General Pam Bondi hailed the Supreme Court’s decision as “a landmark victory for the rule of law.” She pledged to continue combatting crime and illegal immigration in federal court and added, “An activist judge in Washington, DC does not have the jurisdiction to seize control of President Trump’s authority to conduct foreign policy and keep the American people safe.”

In a separate case, the Supreme Court chief justice also blocked a lower court’s order demanding that a deported man accused of being a member of the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) foreign terrorist organization be returned to the U.S. Federal law enforcement identified Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia as an MS-13 member and deported him to a prison in El Salvador. Determining that Garcia had been deported in error, a judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland ordered, according to the Trump administration, that “it must not only negotiate with a foreign country to return an enemy alien on foreign soil, but also succeed by” midnight on Monday.

On behalf of the Trump administration, new Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote, “Even amidst a deluge of unlawful injunctions, this order is remarkable. Even [Garcia’s legal representatives] did not ask the district court to force the United States to persuade El Salvador to release Abrego Garcia — a native of El Salvador detained in El Salvador — on a judicially mandated clock.” The Trump administration argued that foreign relations are the purview of the executive branch of the federal government, not the judicial branch, and that negotiating Garcia’s return to the U.S. would jeopardize national security. Roberts agreed on Monday to temporarily halt the district court’s demands.

Over the past three months, the Trump administration has been besieged by a record number of TROs and preliminary injunctions issued by district courts, impeding and restricting the agenda that the president was elected to enact. Some of the more recent examples of courts restricting the president’s agenda include orders demanding that biological men identifying as transgender be housed in women’s prisons and blocking efforts to bar transgender-identifying individuals from enlisting in the U.S. military, among others. But, in addition to addressing cases relating to the president’s deportations, the Supreme Court also took aim last week at an inferior court’s order barring the president from ending diversity-related education grants.

In a per curiam order issued Friday, the Supreme Court determined that a Massachusetts district court lacked the appropriate jurisdiction to issue a sweeping, nationwide TRO forcing the Trump administration to continue paying for diversity-related grants to educational institutions. Additionally, the Supreme Court stipulated that the diversity-related programs are unlikely to suffer “irreparable harm” provided that they cease operations until the courts resolve the conflict, whereas the federal government would suffer “irreparable harm” if it were forced to pay millions of taxpayer dollars that it would never be able to fully recover, should the courts finally rule in the Trump administration’s favor. Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Barrett granted the Trump administration’s request and stayed the district court’s order, while Roberts, Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson would not have.

In another order, issued Tuesday, the Supreme Court halted another inferior court’s order demanding that the Trump administration rehire approximately 16,000 federal workers who had been placed on administrative leave. Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California had previously ordered the Departments of Defense, Treasury, Energy, Interior, Agriculture, and Veterans Affairs to reinstate thousands of probationary employees who had been hired by the Biden administration and dismissed by the Trump administration. “The court’s preliminary injunction … let third parties hijack the employment relationship between the federal government and its workforce,” Harris wrote, asking the Supreme Court to intervene. She continued, “And, like many other recent orders, the court’s extraordinary reinstatement order violates the separation of powers, arrogating to a single district court the Executive Branch’s powers of personnel management on the flimsiest of grounds and the hastiest of timelines.” She added, “That is no way to run a government. This Court should stop the ongoing assault on the constitutional structure before further damage is wrought.”

In its unsigned order staying Alsup’s order, the Supreme Court wrote, “The District Court’s injunction was based solely on the allegations of the nine non-profit-organization plaintiffs in this case. But under established law, those allegations are presently insufficient to support the organizations’ standing.” However, the Supreme Court’s order did not address the “claims of the other plaintiffs,” since those claims were not a part of Alsup’s reasoning in issuing his preliminary injunction. In this case, both Roberts and Barrett sided with Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh, and Gorsuch in siding with the Trump administration, as did Kagan. Sotomayor and Jackson both would have denied the Trump administration’s request.

Responding to the Supreme Court staying the order, Deputy Assistant to the President and White House Deputy Communications Director Kaelan Dorr commented, “POTUS is on a heater at SCOTUS[.] 4 wins in 5 days.”