WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump has offered a fresh rebuke of the legal system and its decisions against his administration, this time including the Supreme Court in his indignation after it ordered a temporary halt in his efforts to swiftly deport Venezuelan migrants over the weekend.
“My team is fantastic, doing an incredible job, however, they are being stymied at every turn by even the U.S. Supreme Court, which I have such great respect for, but which seemingly doesn’t want me to send violent criminals and terrorists back to Venezuela, or any other Country, for that matter — People that came here illegally!” Trump wrote in a post Monday on his social media site Truth Social.
The president went on to praise Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito — who, along with fellow conservative Justice Clarence Thomas did not join the majority in backing the order and wrote a sharp dissent in response — for being “right on this!”
In the post, Trump made clear he does not intend to give every person his administration intends to deport a trial, an issue at the heart of his use of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to quickly send migrants out of the country.
“We cannot give everyone a trial, because to do so would take, without exaggeration, 200 years,” the president wrote. “We would need hundreds of thousands of trials for the hundreds of thousands of Illegals we are sending out of the Country.”
He added that such a feat is “not possible.”
It comes after the Supreme Court, in a brief order released just before 1 a.m. Saturday, temporarily blocked the deportation of Venezuelans held in the Bluebonnet Detention Center in Anson, Texas, under the Alien Enemies Act until a new decision is issued.
The decision from the high court was in response to an emergency appeal from the American Civil Liberties Union, which publicly is arguing that the migrants were in danger of being imprisoned in El Salvador without getting due process.
In his dissent, Alito wrote that the decision came “literally in the middle of the night” and argued that there is “dubious factual support” to support granting the emergency request.
The Trump administration has already filed paperwork asking the Supreme Court to reconsider its pause.
Last month the Trump administration invoked the 18th century wartime authority — which has been used only three other times in history, each during times of war — to speedily send more than 200 migrants it says are affiliated with gangs MS-13 and Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua to El Salvador’s notorious megaprison.
The move sparked multiple legal battles, including one regarding a man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was living in Maryland and sent to El Savaldaor, that has captured Washington’s attention after the administration acknowledged in initial court filings that his deportation was the result of an “administrative error.”
The Supreme Court previously weighed in on the topic earlier this month, deciding that the administration could use the Alien Enemies Act to deport migrants but those at risk of being sent out of the country must be provided “an opportunity to challenge their removal."
In an interview with ABC News over the weekend, Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, sought to make the case that there is a different bar for due process under the Alien Enemies Act.
“I'm not arguing right here that nobody should get due process,” Homan said. “I'm just saying there's a different process under the Alien Enemies Act, and less of a process than you see through Title VIII.”
The president has previously lashed out at decisions from courts regarding his use of this authority, including calling for the impeachment of a federal judge who previously sought to pause his deportations. That led Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts to issue a rare statement in which he referred to such calls as "not an appropriate response."
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt also made clear the White House sees it as the high court’s responsibility to “rein in these activist judges."