The Supreme Court Lets Third-Country Deportations Resume While It Agrees to Hear the Case

NPR reports that the Supreme Court has allowed the Trump administration to resume deportations of migrants to countries that are not identified in their removal orders, and that the Court plans to hear full arguments on the case. Those two facts sit oddly together, and the oddity is the story. The administration gets to act now; the legal question gets argued later. Whatever standard the justices ultimately apply, people can be removed in the meantime to destinations their removal orders never named, and the litigation will proceed against a backdrop of removals that have already happened. That procedural sequence — relief first, merits afterward — is worth noticing because it is easy to read a headline about a win by one side and miss that the underlying rule has not been settled. NPR's report is explicit that fuller argument is still coming.