For nearly six months, federal district court judges have been blocking President Donald Trump’s executive orders and actions, especially those centered on immigration policy. Now, a judge is trying to block the nation’s highest court. The U.S. Supreme Court issued an order Monday in Department of Homeland Security (DHS) v. DVD, a case centered on deportations, halting a lower court’s injunction.

Judge Brian Murphy of the U.S. District Court for Massachusetts, a Biden appointee, issued a preliminary injunction in April, barring the Trump administration from deporting violent illegal immigrants to “third countries” when the home countries of the illegal immigrants refused to repatriate their nationals. “This case presents a simple question: before the United States forcibly sends someone to a country other than their country of origin, must that person be told where they are going and be given a chance to tell the United States that they might be killed if sent there?” Murphy wrote.

He continued, “Defendants have conceded in other proceedings is the minimum that comports with due process. Plaintiffs are simply asking to be told they are going to be deported to a new country before they are taken to such a country, and be given an opportunity to explain why such a deportation will likely result in their persecution, torture, and/or death.” Murphy concluded, “This small modicum of process is mandated by the Constitution of the United States, and for this reason, the motion” for a class certification and injunction is granted.

In late May, the Trump administration began transporting deportees to South Sudan, which was not their nation of origin. Murphy held an emergency hearing and determined that the administration had violated his order. “At today’s emergency hearing, the Court ordered Defendants to maintain custody and control of class members currently being removed to South Sudan or to any other third country, to ensure the practical feasibility of return if the Court finds that such removals were unlawful,” he wrote. He further issued a remedial order requiring DHS to halt its deportation processes and afford deportees time to confer with their lawyers and present their cases for not being sent to South Sudan.

The Supreme Court’s unsigned order Monday halted Murphy’s April injunction. Democrat-appointed Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, with Sotomayor writing, “In matters of life and death, it is best to proceed with caution. In this case, the Government took the opposite approach.” She continued, “Rather than allowing our lower court colleagues to manage this high-stakes litigation with the care and attention it plainly requires, this Court now intervenes to grant the Government emergency relief from an order it has repeatedly defied. I cannot join so gross an abuse of the Court’s equitable discretion.” Sotomayor argued that the Supreme Court’s decision was improperly applied, claiming that “the District Court’s remedial orders are not properly before this Court because

the Government has not appealed them, nor sought a stay pending a forthcoming appeal.”

Immediately following the Supreme Court’s stay of Murphy’s order, a group of deportees filed an emergency motion asking Murphy to enforce his remedial orders, which had been issued in May in response to the Trump administration’s alleged violation of the original injunction, which had now been stayed. In an electronic docket entry, Murphy seemingly ignored the Supreme Court’s stay, instead citing Sotomayor’s dissent to explain that an additional order “enforcing” his remedial order was “unnecessary,” since the remedial orders were not appealed by name.

Trump administration officials and allies, along with conservative policy and legal scholars, accused Murphy of defying the Supreme Court and staging a “judicial coup.” Constitutional attorney and Article III Project founder Mike Davis called for Murphy’s impeachment, commenting, “This leftwing radical Biden judge got jammed through the Senate in December, in the lame-duck session after Democrats lost the White House and Senate. Six months into the job, Massachusetts U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy is now openly defying a Supreme Court order.”

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, credited with devising the Trump administration’s immigration policy and strategy, commented, “A district judge has just announced he will openly defy the unambiguous ruling issued today by the Supreme Court and continue to block the expulsion of illegal aliens convicted of child rape and murder.” Referring to accusations that the Trump administration has refused to comply with the multitude of court orders levied against its agenda, Adrian Vermeule, a constitutional law professor at Harvard University School of Law, quipped, “The ‘defiance of judicial orders’ is coming from inside the house.”

In a motion filed Tuesday morning, the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to clarify its Monday order, specifically looking at Murphy’s “unprecedented defiance of this Court’s authority.” U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote, “The district court’s ruling of last night is a lawless act of defiance that, once again, disrupts sensitive diplomatic relations and slams the brakes on the Executive’s lawful efforts to effectuate third-country removals. For over two months now, the Executive has labored under an injunction that this Court yesterday deemed unenforceable.”

He continued, “This Court should immediately make clear that the district court’s enforcement order has no effect, and put a swift end to the ongoing irreparable harm to the Executive Branch and its agents, who remain under baseless threat of contempt as they are forced to house dangerous criminal aliens” instead of deporting them. Sauer noted that DHS personnel are, due to Murphy’s order, currently forced to remain “at a military base in the Horn of Africa that now lies on the borders of a regional conflict.”

Andrew Arthur, resident fellow in law and policy at the Center for Immigration Studies, told The Washington Stand that the Supreme Court “needs to rein in the ability of a single judge in a single district court to stymie facially lawful immigration enforcement.” He continued, “Circuit panels require the concurrence of at least two judges to take an action, and the Supreme Court requires the concurrence of at least five justices. Nowhere else in our federal legal system does one unelected individual have so much power.”

In comments to TWS, Lora Ries, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Border Security and Immigration Center, said, “The Left’s tactic against mass deportations comes down to one word: ‘delay.’ Delay in the courts, delay on the streets, delay in Congress.” She explained, “With the court decisions so far, we’ve only received red lights/green lights on procedural aspects, particularly injunctions and stays, not decisions on the merits.” Ries continued, “We’ll have to wait for a whole other round of hearings and rulings to get decisions on the constitutionality of President Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order, invoking the Alien Enemies Act for Tren de Aragua gang members, and more.”

“It is well-past time for the Supreme Court and Congress to end district court judges ordering nationwide injunctions and for Congress to fully fund ICE to carry out mass deportations,” Ries concluded.