SCOTUS Overturns District Court Defiance Of Prior Ruling, Decries Sotomayor’s “Provocative Language”
Sotomayor Dissent joined by Jackson: “Other litigants must follow the rules, but the administration has the Supreme Court on speed dial.”
The Supreme Court recently stayed a district court order which prevented the Trump administration from removing eight convicted criminals with immigration court orders of removal because they were being transferred to South Sudan. In fact, they already were in process and at a layover in Djibouti when the order came down and they have been there since. The District Court’s reasoning was that despite the multiple instances of due process afforded them, they were entitled to another hearing on whether removal to South Sudan would violate their rights under the Convention Against Torture.
After the Supreme Court stayed the injunction, clearing the way for them to be transferred to South Sudan, the District Court issued a second injunction, claiming that the SCOTUS stay did not affect the entirety of the case, and that a subsequent injunction as to “remedies” was not before SCOTUS when it ruled. I know I discussed this defiance in a media appearance, but I can’t find it.
It was a bad faith argument, and SCOTUS just rejected it (6-3) [correction – 7-2, Kagan wrote a concurring opinion] after the government filed a motion to clarify the prior ruling. From the Supreme Court ruling:
On June 23, we stayed the April 18 preliminary injunction pending disposition of any appeal and petition for writ of certiorari. Later that day, however, the District Court issued a minute order stating that the May 21 remedial order “remain[ed] in full force and effect,” “notwithstanding” our stay of the preliminary injunction. ECF Doc. 176. The only authority it cited was the dissent from the stay order.
The Government has moved for “an order clarifying” our stay. Motion for Clarification. It argues that the stay of the April 18 preliminary injunction divests the May 21 remedial order of enforceability. Respondents argue that the District Court correctly understood the May 21 order to remain in effect—despite our stay of the preliminary injunction it purported to enforce—because the May 21 order effectively operates as a remedy for civil contempt. The motion for clarification is granted. 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.
Despite the dissent’s provocative language, see post, at 6 (opinion of SOTOMAYOR, J.), a claim that a lower court has failed to give effect to an order of this Court is properly addressed here….
2/ SCOTUS: We expect the district court will NOW obey us but if not then use mandamus. pic.twitter.com/zpHTniJdke
— Margot Cleveland (@ProfMJCleveland) July 3, 2025
What was the “provocative” language by the self-described Wise Latina joined by KBJ? This, among other things:
Although Members of today’s majority have previously insisted that “this Court should follow established procedures” when granting emergency relief, A. A. R. P., 604 U. S., at ____ (ALITO, J., dissenting) (slip op., at 5), the Court now ignores its Rules to grant the Government its desired “clarification” immediately. The majority suggests (relying on an argument the Government did not make) that a remedy for civil contempt is not enforceable when the underlying injunction has been stayed.1 Ante, at 2. Perhaps that should be the rule, but the question appears to be a matter of first impression in this Court….
In the end, the majority ignores the Court’s Rules for seeking emergency relief and creates new law on civil contempt, all to allow the Government to circumvent the appellate process with respect to an order it continues to defy….
“In a democracy, power implies responsibility. The greater the power that defies law the less tolerant can this Court be of defiance. As the Nation’s ultimate judicial tribunal, this Court, beyond any other organ of society, is the trustee of law and charged with the duty of securing obedience to it.” Mine Workers, 330 U. S., at 312 (Frankfurter, J., concurring in judgment). This Court continues to invert those principles. Today’s order clarifies only one thing: Other litigants must follow the rules, but the administration has the Supreme Court on speed dial. [Emphasis added.]
There’s a good reason the administration has SCOTUS on speed dial – The Resistance has federal district court judges on speed dial and has received numerous improper injunctions, sometimes in the dead of night or with the government not being permitted to respond.
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Comments
First of all, I am glad that common sense prevailed and even Democrats must follow the law.
But I must say, Sotomayor has upped her game. She’s going beyond the wisdom of her old experiences, or she’s gained new SCOTUS experiences and has become a snappy lawyer. (I am not a lawyer but I play one on legal blogs.)
I was impressed with her dissent in the Universal Injunctions case last week. (As opposed to KBJ’s braindead individual dissent that we’re all laughing at.) This time, it’s pure legalism, legalism to the exclusion of all common sense. She’s entered a legal twilight zone in her writing. She’s come so far from repeating the same old civil rights nostrums and ignoring the facts and the law. Maybe she has AI coming up with legal arguments now, and it’s coming up with good ones. She here finds an obscure legal argument that is so weird nobody’s stated it yet, and uses it in her official dissent. Well done, A+.
I’m just glad she’s in the minority. If the Dems had a majority, these would be majority opinions, and they’d proclaim them “landmarks”.
Barney Fife’s timeless advice. When a problem is brewing, “Nip it in the bud.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbHtM39vy4c
The Senate failed when the nominations of the Wide Latina and the dreadful AA Brown were being considered. And now these two pathetic know-nothings are on the Court. And Roberts (rhymes with wet noodle) now has these two flounders,
I am now in a case where I am clearly against AI. Tons of sophisticated sounding BS…. judge too stupid to realize it
I might suggest you get your own AI. Heard of a guy in court against a big corporation. Represented himself, but got AI to script his legal arguments. Judge nodded approvingly during the case, and he won.
god save the queen
she aint no human being
Due process is whatever they say it is. Once it is established someone is here illegally, then they should be deported. Period.
There’s a long line of biased district judges who deserve the disobedient puppy treatment of a rolled-up newspaper and good swat across the nose. Good to see the SC putting their newspaper subscriptions to good use.
The newspaper treatment is ONLY suitable for basic instruction, it is not a remedial treatment. These two “wise” blackbirds are far beyond suitability for the roll in the nose, gently, game.
In high school my first period teacher applied his genuine Italian pizzaboard, he large size. The rule was “if you are not in your assigned seat with your texbook open to the day’s assigned page before the final bell finished sounding, you were “invited” (the word he used as synonym for blatant compulsion) to “come to the front of the classroom, NOW to receive your just reward. hat guy swung that board like a New York Yankee champ up to bat. Once that thing connected with anyone’s posterior ………..This treatment is most suitable for that “why is latina” judge…….
DEI Ovomit Sotomayor idiot joined by DEI Brandon clowny Jackson.
Yet any of these Commissar Judges can throw a monkey wrench into the government gears, and once pulled out they are free to do it again.
Roberts needs to have a little tête-à-tête with these two — AND a bunch of the lower court Dem fanboys — and ‘splain how the system works. Right now, the inmates are running the asylum, and that cannot continue.
The public perception of the judicial branch is in the toilet. Gee, I wonder how that happened.
Goona get worse before it gets better because Roberts is a weasel.
The public perception of the judicial branch belongs in the toilet. They grabbed their power and awarded it to themselves in Marbury v. Madison (1803). Ever since then it’s been very very sketchy.
Murphy has given Congress the evidence for his impeachment. Disobeying the Supreme Courts order. It’s now up to Speaker Johnson to bring the hammer. Force this rouge Judge to testify before America why he disobeyed a direct order from the Supreme Court. He may survive in the Senate, but it will send a direct message to these District court Judges that they will all face the same treatment if they disobey the Supreme Court this is what they will face.
He didn’t disobey. At worst he was unaware of an obscure precedent; at best there was no precedent at the time, and SCOTUS has now set it for the first time.
I thought ignorance of the law was no defense. At the least, not very impressive on Judge Murphy’s part.
There is probably a countable infinity of such twisty little passages, all looking alike, novel legal arguments to be made because they are too ridiculous to have been made before. We have a real substantive problem here.
An administration should have SCOTUS on speed dial.
1. An administration has a limited amount of time in which to fulfill its agenda to the degree that the law permits. SCOTUS is the only court that can definitively answer what is within the law and what is outside of it, freeing the POTUS to pursue his agenda or to curtail it based on law.
2. Allowing lower courts (that may be overruled) to dictate policy against the agenda of the duly elected POTUS slights the authority of the people who, in their capacity as voters, elected the POTUS to put his agenda into effect. Lower courts can unnecessarily delay (hoping to deny) the will of the people (see #1 above). This is not the purpose for which lower courts exist. Although SCOTUS may do the same, it may also allow the agenda item to go forward.
This is the second decision in a week the ‘conservative’ majority has called out intemperate language in the liberal dissent; perhaps Robert’s had had enough. We shall see.
Interesting, it’s beginning to look like the majority is getting sick of the minority on the court throwing politics into every opinion they write.
Which district court has jurisdiction over Djibouti?
Yeah, let the judge enforce his order there. lol
Salty harpies in the minority throwing their tantrums…what else is new
The depths of their ignorance is pretty shocking. And we may not have reached bottom yet.
Perhaps the biblical millstone would be useful in this context.
That’s not what happened. Look at the dates.
April 18: Court issues preliminary injunction
May 21: Court issues a second order as a remedy for the government’s contempt of the first order.
June 23: SCOTUS stays the Apr-18 order
In response to this the court issued not a new injunction but merely a minute order, noting that SCOTUS had only stayed the first order, and therefore the second one remained in effect. SCOTUS has now said no, since the second order was a remedy for a breach of the first, as soon as the first order was stayed the second one automatically disappeared.
Sotomayor doesn’t disagree, but says that wasn’t the SCOTUS precedent at the time, it’s a new rule the court is announcing now, so the district court judge was acting correctly according to the precedents in effect on Jun-23. The majority disagrees, citing precedents that it says did already establish this rule.
So we have:
Court April 18: You didn’t do what I told you to do and I’m angry.
Court May 21: Here’s the penalty for not doing what I told you to do.
SC: They didn’t have to do what you told them to do.
Court (after) The penalty still stands.
SC: Are you nuts? The penalty goes away too. Don’t make me come over there, because I’m bringing a legal whuppin if you do this again.
Lack of self-awareness. The administration’s opponents seem to have several district courts on speed dial — even at half past midnight!
This is so over my head! But I looked up Judge Murphy in Mass., who was appointed by Biden in 2024. I think several of these judges have pretty short histories as District Judges. Yet they feel compelled to challenge a duly elected president. All in all, the District Court and even the Supreme Court are making it clear that politics do indeed influence decisions. Even Kagan, acknowledged as the smart liberal, changed her position recently from what it had been under Biden. Gotta wonder if the public will continue to respect court decisions.
This district judge has been duly appointed for longer than the president has been duly elected (in this term at least). Isn’t that enough? /sarc
Seems like for the first time the District Court game has been exposed because they overplayed their hand. Appeal to SCOTUS, SCOTUS issues a stay, make a new ruling on the same thing as a work around. This is the game. Every time you get told you can’t do something just tweak it a little and do it again. Until the judges that do this sort of thing get removed from the bench it will be never ending
They learned this tactic from Biden and the student loan forgiveness operation.
“District Court …overplayed their hand.”
The Left always does that; it’s their most characteristic trait. It’s sometimes called doubling down on stupid.
Sotomayor proves the danger of affirmative action. She admits it was responsible for getting her into Princeton. Apparently this leg up did nothing in helping her prepare for Yale Law School because she admits affirmative action was again responsible for gaining admittance. She apparently took her studies seriously and became a left wing firebrand, but at no point did she distinguish herself by intellectual ability. Who can blame her for accepting undeserved career advancement when she worked hard and was being told by those it authority in served a great social purpose? Don’t hate Sotomayor. Hate the traitors who advanced her.
The Supreme Court could have clarified this 2 weeks ago when it reversed the lower court, by adding a single sentence to the effect that all of the lower court’s orders in support of its now-overruled order are also dissolved or must be dissolved by the judge. Maybe the Supreme Court thought that that was such an obvious conclusion that to have said it would have been an affront to the dignity of the lower court, which is often a reason for a remand without an order of mandamus. But this kind of spoonfeeding guidance may have become more necessary in a hyperpartisan era in which litigants and sometimes selected lower courts seize on any reason to avoid giving the full and anticipated effect an appellate court’s order (e.g., workarounds to the SFA case, and trying to use class action practice to achieve the equivalent of national injunctions).
The decision on the government’s motion was 7-2, not 6-3. Kagan, showing a bit of sense, concurred, stating that although she still disagrees with the Court’s decision to grant the stay, once the Court acted the district judge “cannot “compel compliance with an order that this Court has stayed.”
So much for a ” wise Latina.”
This outcome is the result of Judge Murphy’s attempt to employ a slight of hand trick to avoid the applicable “the law of the case” by hiding his abject dissidence of SCOTUS behind the inapplicable concept of demoting the SCOTUS decision to mere “precedent”. The concepts are related but for sure not the same. Judge Murphy issued an injunction, then sanctioned the United States for violating his injunction. SCOTUS stayed the injunction. That SCOTUS decision must (not “may”) be followed in the case involving Judge Murphy’s injunction, and is “the law of the case”, period, full stop. Action upon that stayed injunction is a violation of that law.
Courts (including Judge Murphy’s Court) may consider the SCOTUS decision to be “precedent” to follow in another similar case involving other litigants and different facts. In such instances, courts may rely upon or chose to ignore the SCOTUS decision, as it represents only “precedent” in such other case.
There is no doubt Judge Murphy’s “minute order” was a knowing, intentional, and thus unlawful violation of the law of the case dressed up as ignoring precedent by citing the dissenting opinion as authority.
Not a lawyer either, however, KBJ’s “wait for it” was such a national embarrassment! One wonders how many laughs she garnered in conferences when that piece of tripe was reviewed? Her clerks must have really been pushing for clicks on Instagram and X/Twitter and whatever. As for Kagan, who I at least had some little respect for being a more cogent, coherent attorney than the other two, for her to sign onto that pile of bovine exhaust was equally embarrassing.
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