The US Supreme Court’s decision Monday night allowing the Trump administration to resume deportations under the Alien Enemies Act is a landmark in the collapse of the constitutional framework of the United States. While the ruling nominally concerns a technicality, its practical and political implications are clear. In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court has given the green light to mass abductions and expulsions ordered by the White House, including the seizure of American citizens.
The significance of the decision was laid out in a scathing dissent written by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, which was joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. The dissent noted that it is the position of the government that it can deport anyone it labels a member of the Tren de Aragua gang and that “even when it makes a mistake, it cannot retrieve individuals from the Salvadoran prisons to which it has sent them.”
Sotomayor wrote:
The implication of the Government’s position is that not only noncitizens but also United States citizens could be taken off the streets, forced onto planes, and confined to foreign prisons with no opportunity for redress if judicial review is denied unlawfully before removal. History is no stranger to such lawless regimes, but this Nation’s system of laws is designed to prevent, not enable, their rise.
That is, the gang of five unelected fascists on the Supreme Court have rubber-stamped a presidential dictatorship.
The unsigned, four-page order contains no real legal arguments. It simply vacates two orders by US District Court Judge James Boasberg halting deportations under the Alien Enemies Act and declares that any challenges to the administration’s actions should have been filed in Texas, not Washington D.C.
The ruling recalls pseudo-legal decrees issued by courts under fascist regimes. The difference is that, unlike Hitler in 1933–34, Trump lacks a mass fascist movement in the streets. He rules instead through the mechanisms of the capitalist state, with the backing or complicity of the courts and both corporate parties.
Trump immediately celebrated the decision as “A GREAT DAY FOR JUSTICE IN AMERICA!” His fascist adviser Stephen Miller declared (all in capital letters): “ALIEN ENEMIES ACT NOW IN FULL EFFECT. THE FOREIGN TERRORISTS WILL BE ARRESTED AND EXPELLED.”
The decision concerns actions taken by the Trump administration after the March 14 executive order invoking the Alien Enemies Act. The order was used to transport hundreds of mainly Venezuelan immigrants to a maximum security prison in El Salvador. The prison is overseen by the fascist Salvadoran president, Nayib Bukele, who has already stated that he was willing to intern US citizens as well. To justify these expulsions, Trump claimed that a gang allegedly tied to the Venezuelan government was carrying out an “invasion” of the United States.
The administration deported more than 200 people in open defiance of the ruling by Judge Boasberg ordering they be halted and the planes already in the air be turned around. Reviewing the circumstances under which the deportations took place, Justice Sotomayor stated that:
the Government was engaged in a covert operation to deport dozens of immigrants without notice or an opportunity for hearings.
She wrote that by vacating Boasberg’s temporary restraining order against further deportations, the Court was “rewarding” the government’s illegal actions and permitting deportations that “violated the Due Process Clause’s most fundamental protections.”
Justice Jackson, in a separate statement, denounced the court’s use of the emergency docket to bypass full hearings, writing: “We are just as wrong now as we have been in the past, with similarly devastating consequences.” She compared the ruling to the notorious Korematsu decision of 1944, which upheld the internment of Japanese Americans. She wrote:
At least when the Court went off base in the past, it left a record so posterity could see how it went wrong. ... It just seems we are now less willing to face it.
This ruling is a component part of an overarching conspiracy to establish a presidential dictatorship. It comes just under one year after the court’s decision in Trump v. United States, which granted the president immunity from prosecution for all “official acts”—including, potentially, launching a military coup, accepting bribes or ordering political assassinations.
In the less than three months since coming to office, Trump, alongside the mass deportations under the Alien Enemies Act, has carried out a sweeping assault on First Amendment protections of free speech and political expression. Students have been seized for opposing the genocide in Gaza, including Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk and others. Momodou Taal, a Ph.D. candidate at Cornell University, was forced to leave the country after challenging Trump’s executive orders. Hundreds of student visas have been revoked nationwide under the “catch and revoke” surveillance and deportation program.
How long will it be before an American citizen—a lawyer, a journalist or even a member of Congress—is seized and imprisoned? Indeed, it is less than two weeks before a deadline set by a January 20 executive order for the secretary of defense and the secretary of homeland security to present recommendations on the invocation of the Insurrection Act, which would allow for the deployment of the military domestically and the effective imposition of martial law.
The Supreme Court’s decision makes clear that Trump is not acting as an isolated figure but as a representative of a corrupt and criminal capitalist oligarchy. The Trump administration is the executive instrument of billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, who are waging a war on the working class through the destruction of social programs, mass layoffs of federal workers, trillions in tax cuts for the rich and the elimination of all restraints on capitalist exploitation.
Indeed, the day after its ruling on the Alien Enemies Act, the Supreme Court, in a 7-2 decision, paused an order that would have required the Trump administration to rehire more than 16,000 probationary employees fired under the direction of Elon Musk—the world’s wealthiest individual—and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
The Democratic Party offers no opposition. It is complicit or craven, or both, in the face of Trump’s attacks. There has been no statement from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer or House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, nor from “independent” Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders or Democratic Socialists of America member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in response to the Supreme Court ruling.
A number of Democrats on the House and Senate judiciary committees issued a statement focusing on the decision’s assertion that individuals seized and subject to deportation have the right to file habeas corpus petitions, which, the Democrats noted, “will make it very difficult for people to successfully challenge their removals before they happen.” It concluded with the empty declaration that “we will be watching closely to ensure that the Administration complies with the Court’s order…”
In the 11 weeks since Trump’s inauguration, the Democrats have worked to demobilize opposition to the administration’s fascist policies. Last month, the Democrats ensured passage of the Republicans’ government funding bill and last week voted to deliver billions in weapons to Israel to continue its genocide in Gaza.
The corporate media, for its part, is complicit in covering up the enormity of what is happening. The Supreme Court ruling has been met with muted coverage aimed at covering up its vast and ominous implications.
There is broad popular opposition to the effort to establish a presidential dictatorship. The April 5 protests—largely spontaneous and involving millions of people across the US just weeks into Trump’s presidency—shattered the narrative, promoted by the Democratic Party and the corporate media, that Trump is an all-powerful and unchallengeable figure.
Workers, youth and retirees took to the streets all across the country to demonstrate their defiance of Trump’s police-state measures, assault on jobs and social programs and support for genocide and war. Many denounced the complicity of the Democrats, the trade union bureaucracy and the judicial system, and demanded action to stop this government and the corporate oligarchy it represents.
The demonstrations have been downplayed or ignored altogether by the media, an expression of the ruling class’s deep anxiety over the emergence of mass opposition from below. This censorship has emboldened Trump and his co-conspirators on the Supreme Court, well aware of the danger of a revolt from below, to step up the erection of a fascist dictatorship.
The opposition must be transformed into a conscious political movement. It must be rooted in the working class, the only social force capable of halting the descent into barbarism and transforming society on a democratic and egalitarian foundation.
The courts will not stop it. The Democratic Party will not stop it. The trade union apparatus will not stop it. Only the working class, organized independently and armed with a socialist program, can defeat the counterrevolution of the capitalist oligarchy.
The Socialist Equality Party is fighting to build the revolutionary leadership the working class needs to defeat the drive toward fascism and war. The urgent task is to transform the broad and growing opposition to Trump’s dictatorship into a conscious political movement against the capitalist system.