Federal Courts Buck Trump Deportation Schemes, Focusing on Due Process Rights

If there has been a common theme in the federal courts’ response to the fallout from President Trump’s aggressive deportation policies, it is that the White House cannot rush headlong into expelling people by sidestepping the fundamental principle of due process.

In case after case, a legal bottom line is emerging: Immigrants should at least be given the opportunity to challenge their deportations, especially as Trump officials have claimed novel and extraordinary powers to remove them.

The latest and clearest expression of that view came on Friday evening, when the Supreme Court chided the Trump administration for seeking to provide only a day’s warning to a group of Venezuelan immigrants in Texas it had been trying to deport under the expansive powers of an 18th-century wartime law.

“Notice roughly 24 hours before removal, devoid of information about how to exercise due process rights to contest that removal,” the justices wrote, “surely does not pass muster.”

While many questions remain to be answered about Mr. Trump’s deportation plans, many legal scholars have hailed courts’ support of due process. At the same time, they have also expressed concern that such support was needed in the first place.

“It’s great that courts are standing up for one of the most basic principles that underlie our constitutional order — that ‘persons’ (not ‘citizens’) are entitled to due process before being deprived of life, liberty, or property,” Michael Klarman, a professor at Harvard Law School, wrote in an email. “It would be even better if the administration would simply cease violating such principles.”