The Trump administration asked the justices to allow it to use a wartime law to continue deportations of Venezuelans with little or no due process.
The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Friday to allow it to use a rarely invoked wartime law to continue to deport Venezuelans with little to no due process.
The emergency application arrived at the court after a federal appeals court kept in place a temporary block on the deportations. In its application to the Supreme Court, lawyers for the administration argued that the matter was too urgent to wait for the case to wind its way through the lower courts.
In the government’s application, acting Solicitor General Sarah M. Harris said the case presented “fundamental questions about who decides how to conduct sensitive national-security-related operations in this country.”
“The Constitution supplies a clear answer: the president,” Ms. Harris wrote. “The Republic cannot afford a different choice.”
The case will offer a major early test for how the nation’s highest court will confront President Trump’s aggressive efforts to deport of millions of migrants and his hostile posture toward the courts. Mr. Trump has called for impeaching a lower-court judge who paused his deportations.
The case hinges on the legality of an executive order signed by Mr. Trump that invokes the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. The order uses the law to target people believed to be Venezuelan gang members in the United States.
