Amy Howe:
Well, we don’t know for sure, because the justices didn’t provide any reasoning for their order. And that was another thing that Justice Alito sort of lamented in his dissent that came out on Saturday night.
But it seemed like they were concerned about the prospect that detainees could be removed from this Northern District of Texas, and in particular, this Bluebonnet detention facility in Anson, Texas, to El Salvador, or somewhere else, out of the country without the detainees having the kind of notice and opportunity to challenge their removal that the Supreme Court said in an order on April 7 that they were entitled to.
And the detainees’ lawyers filed a reply brief today. And in that reply brief, which was filed around 5:30 this morning, they said, this was not a false alarm. There is a video and it had been reports that there were, in fact, buses heading towards the airport that turned around after we made our filing in the Supreme Court.
