| Of all the court fights over policies enacted by President Donald Trump’s administration, perhaps none are as consequential as those that center on deporting undocumented immigrants. By removing migrants from the country quickly, often without due process, Trump is testing a theory of almost unlimited presidential power and whether the courts can stop him, legal and immigration experts say. “If the courts aren’t checking his power, then all our rights are in jeopardy,” David Bier, director of immigration studies at the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute, said in a recent interview. “All they have to do is put you on a plane and remove you from the country, and you’re in an El Salvadoran prison, and they could say, ‘Eh, there’s nothing to even fix the mistake.’” Lower courts have almost uniformly pushed back against Trump’s attempts to deport migrants without giving them a chance to contest it, ruled against sending migrants to countries they aren’t from, and paused his attempts to stop some international students from attending school in the United States. The Supreme Court has sometimes stepped in to let Trump’s controversial deportation policies continue while the potentially years-long legal fights on the merits of these policies play out. That means that Trump’s deportations face legal hurdles but haven’t been stopped, even as some judges question their legality. “It’s looking like a rosier picture for the Trump administration,” said Jessica Levinson, a professor at Loyola Law School and host of the “Passing Judgment” podcast. Here’s what’s going on. Trump can continue deporting people to third countries This week, the Supreme Court said that the Trump administration can deport migrants to countries where they are not citizens, while the legal battle over this plays out in the lower courts. This has been a major — and controversial — piece of Trump’s push for mass deportations. The administration has reached agreements with several countries — including El Salvador, Costa Rica and Panama — to send migrants removed from the United States who are unable to be sent to their countries of origin. Trump deported Venezuelans to a brutal Salvadoran prison without giving them an opportunity to challenge their removals, and later tried to send to South Sudan and Libya migrants who have no ties to those countries. Now with immigration raids being conducted in workplaces, places of worship, stores, courthouses and parking lots across the country, there’s an added threat of being whisked away to a faraway country, such as South Sudan, “a nation the State Department considers too unsafe for all but its most critical personnel,” liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor said in her dissent this week. In addition to the act of removing migrants from the country, some immigration experts say Trump’s aggressive deportations send an intimidating message to other migrants to self-deport. “Fire up the deportation planes,” Tricia McLaughlin, an assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, said in a statement following the Supreme Court’s ruling this week. The courts are pushing back on specific cases Still, it has been a mixed bag for Trump at the courts on immigration, Levinson and other legal experts said. This month, a federal court said that the Venezuelans whisked away to El Salvador can challenge their detention and ordered the government to give them opportunities to do so. And the Trump administration returned a Guatemalan man who was wrongly deported to Mexico. The Supreme Court has issued several orders stressing that migrants must be given due process rights. One such order, in a late-night ruling, quickly stopped the May deportations of more Venezuelan men. Muzaffar Chishti, an attorney with the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, said that decision suggested some justices could view some of what Trump is doing as legally troublesome. “The Supreme Court is giving signals to him, at least on deportations, that what he’s doing is not normal,” he said. Courts have also initially blocked Trump’s attempts to stop international students from entering the country to attend Harvard University. And a Columbia protester who was the first green-card holder to be arrested for his speech, Mahmoud Khalil, was freed from prison last week after months of detention. No person “should actually be detained for protesting a genocide,” Khalil said as he was released. “Justice will prevail.” Where does the legal battle go from here? Expect more debates over the due process of migrants. Trump allies argue those due process rights don’t apply to those here illegally, but the Constitution doesn’t make that distinction. “The due process clause of the U.S. Constitution applies to all who are in the United States, without any distinction as to citizenship,” Denise Gilman, who leads the immigration clinic at the University of Texas School of Law, said in a recent interview. Trump is starting to work with local law enforcement to arrest people or invite Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents into jails to deport people being held for traffic violations or on allegations of other crimes. Immigration expert Bier said that using law enforcement officers who haven’t been trained to make immigration arrests could lead to more mistakes, such as citizens being deported, or people being deported to the wrong countries or places where they could face harm. “We’re going to see a huge number of people deported when they shouldn’t be,” he said. | 
