A Boston judge tried to keep eight convicted murderers and rapists from being deported to South Sudan.
Three times now, the Supreme Court has stepped in to stop him.
On Tuesday the justices shut him down again, and the new opinion reveals exactly how close he came to winning.
Third Country Deportations Survive Third Supreme Court Loss for Same Boston Judge
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court sided with President Trump for the third time in the same immigration case, voting six to three to pause a ruling from U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy that had been slowing rapid deportations to countries other than a migrant's own.
Murphy, a Biden appointee sitting in Boston, has spent eighteen months building new legal roadblocks for ICE to clear.
In an emergency filing, Solicitor General John Sauer told the justices the policy is "an essential tool to remove certain aliens, including some of the worst criminal aliens."
The eight men Murphy fought hardest to protect carried records for killings, sexual assaults, kidnappings and armed robbery, and their own home countries wouldn't take them back.
So DHS found other governments willing to accept them instead.
Murphy's order caught one of those flights already in the air, and ICE diverted it to a U.S. naval base in Djibouti, where the men sat for weeks before the Supreme Court cleared the way to finish the job.
This is the third time the high court has had to override Murphy in this exact case.
The first came in June 2025, when the justices used that same six-to-three split to stay his original injunction.
A second ruling soon after specifically freed up the flight to South Sudan that Murphy had tried to block.
Now it's happened again, and the case still hasn't even been argued on the merits.
Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, with Sotomayor writing that "it is best to proceed with caution" in matters of life and death.
Caution for who.
The men she's defending were convicted killers and rapists with final deportation orders already signed.
DHS Has Deported 25,000 Illegal Aliens to Third Countries Like South Sudan
While Murphy fought this case from his Boston courtroom, DHS kept working.
DHS's top lawyer, James Percival, put a number on it in a post of his own: roughly 25,000 people removed to third countries since Trump took office, a policy he's defended as "an essential public safety tool."
Guatemala, Costa Rica, Ghana, Rwanda, Eswatini and South Sudan have all taken deportees under these arrangements, and Liberia just signed on for up to 1,200 more, with the first batch of twenty already on the ground.
White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis said Tuesday's ruling marks the third time the high court has had to stop the same Boston judge from protecting what she called "the worst-of-the-worst criminals."
Bis added that the president won't stop until every safeguard on his homeland security agenda is in place.
Here's the pattern Democrats keep hoping you won't notice.
Every time Trump finds a lawful way to deport violent criminals, a judge from the opposing party's bench invents a new rule to stop him, and it takes the Supreme Court months to clean up the mess.
A federal appeals court even upheld most of Murphy's ruling last month before the Supreme Court stepped in and reversed course again.
Three liberal justices still sided with Murphy anyway, defending notice periods for men convicted of murder and rape.
Full arguments on the merits come in December, and a lopsided six-to-three stay doesn't bode well for Murphy's legal theory surviving that hearing.
Until then, the deportation flights keep taking off, and roughly 25,000 reasons why that matters are no longer anywhere near your neighborhood.
Sources:
- Jasmine Baehr, Shannon Bream and Bill Mears, "Supreme Court Takes Up Fight Over Trump's Third-Country Illegal Alien Deportation Policy," Fox News, September 29, 2026.
- Amy Curtis, "President Trump's Immigration Agenda Handed Major Temporary Win at the Supreme Court," Townhall, September 30, 2026.
- "SCOTUS Overturns Blockade on Trump's Third-Country Deportations," The Federalist, September 29, 2026.
- "Supreme Court Allows Rapid Third-Country Deportations to Continue," The Conservative Treehouse, September 29, 2026.
- James Percival, DHS General Counsel, post on X, September 24, 2026.
- Solicitor General D. John Sauer, emergency application to the Supreme Court, September 2026.
- Justice Sonia Sotomayor, dissenting opinion, Supreme Court of the United States, September 29, 2026.
