SCOTUS smacks down judge who attempted to stay Trump order in wake of key ruling

Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court paused a lower court’s injunction that blocked the Trump administration from deporting criminal illegal aliens to a third-party country, only for that district judge to immediately thumb his nose at the high court’s stay of his order and insist that his earlier injunction remained in effect.

On Thursday, at the administration’s request, the Supreme Court clarified that a stay is a stay and it meant what it previously said — the lower court’s injunction was no longer in effect and can not be enforced, The Hill reported.

Notably, liberal Justice Elena Kagan, who dissented from the Supreme Court’s decision last month, reluctantly joined her six conservative-leaning colleagues in the “clarification” that lower courts must abide by the orders handed down from the highest court.

Judge defies high court

According to SCOTUSblog, this dispute began in April when the Trump administration attempted to deport eight criminal illegal aliens with orders of removal to South Sudan, only for those migrants to be waylaid at a U.S. military base in Djibouti after Massachusetts District Judge Brian Murphy issued an injunction to block that transfer on April 18, ostensibly because the migrants had not been granted their full Due Process rights.

Amid complaints that the administration had allegedly violated that April 18 injunction by continuing to withhold Due Process rights from the eight deportees, Murphy issued a second order on May 21 that doubled down on the initial injunction and included a threat of civil contempt, which prompted an emergency appeal that quickly reached the Supreme Court.

On June 23, in a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court imposed a stay on the injunction that would allow the administration to, at least temporarily, proceed with deporting illegal migrants to third-party countries, but just hours later, Murphy defiantly insisted that the Supreme Court’s ruling somehow did not apply to his injunction that, in his view, remained in full effect.

Court meant what it said

The open defiance of Judge Murphy toward the Supreme Court led the Trump administration to file another emergency motion that sought “clarification” from the justices, and the high court responded on Thursday, this time with a 7-2 decision that upheld the prior stay of the injunction.

In granting that motion, the unsigned majority opinion stated, “Our June 23 order stayed the April 18 preliminary injunction in full. The May 21 remedial order cannot now be used to enforce an injunction that our stay rendered unenforceable.”

As to the claim that the May 21 order was an effective “remedy for civil contempt” of the April 18 order, the majority observed, “Even if we accepted respondents’ characterization of the May 21 order, such a remedy would serve to ‘coerce’ the Government into ‘compliance’ and would be unenforceable given our stay of the underlying injunction.”

Finally, just in case Murphy continued to defy the high court’s stay, the majority noted, “If the Government wishes to seek additional relief in aid of the execution of our mandate, it may do so through mandamus,” or in other words, an additional order from a higher court that compels a lower court to abide by the superior court’s imposed obligations.

Kagan holds forth on Court’s behalf

Interestingly enough, Justice Kagan opposed the Supreme Court’s June 23 order and joined a fiery dissent at that time by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, but in Thursday’s decision, she declined to join another outraged Sotomayor dissent and instead aligned herself with the conservative-leaning majority, albeit somewhat reluctantly.

In a concurring opinion explaining her stance, Kagan wrote, “I voted to deny the Government’s previous stay application in this case, and I continue to believe that this Court should not have stayed the District Court’s April 18 order enjoining the Government from deporting non-citizens to third countries without notice or a meaningful opportunity to be heard.”

“But a majority of this Court saw things differently, and I do not see how a district court can compel compliance with an order that this Court has stayed,” she continued.

The liberal jurist added, “Because continued enforcement of the District Court’s May 21, 2025, order would do just that, I vote to grant the Government’s motion for clarification.”

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