Published May 16, 2025
By a vote of 7 to 2, the Supreme Court today ruled that two detainees who were deemed to be members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua (TdA) were entitled to injunctive relief against being summarily deported pursuant to President Trump’s Alien Enemies Act declaration. The same relief was extended to members of a putative class of similarly situated detainees in the Northern District of Texas. I’m going to lay out here what the Court ruled (and what it didn’t) and present a quick summary of the divide between the per curiam majority and the two dissenters, Justice Alito and Justice Thomas. (The ruling bears the somewhat confusing caption A.A.R.P. v. Trump. A.A.R.P. is of one of the plaintiffs, not the organization formerly known as the American Association of Retired Persons.)
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Edward Whelan is a Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and holds EPPC’s Antonin Scalia Chair in Constitutional Studies. He is the longest-serving President in EPPC’s history, having held that position from March 2004 through January 2021.
