‘A Loss For President Trump’: CNN’s Paula Reid Breaks Down Supreme Court’s Latest Ruling on Deportations

The Supreme Court handed President Donald Trump a blow on Friday as it ruled in favor of a lower court decision to stop Trump from deporting alleged gang members without due process using emergency powers under the Alien Enemies Act.

“Legal affairs correspondent Paula Reid. Paula, what are we learning?” began anchor Kasie Hunt as the news broke.

“So Kasie, this is a loss for President Trump, but this is not the final word. We know that. He wants to speed up deportations. And as part of that plan, he has invoked the Alien Enemies Act, which allows him to proceed with deportations with less review than he would otherwise,” Reid explained, adding:

Of course, this has set off litigation across the country. And here today, the Supreme Court has blocked the president from moving forward with deportations under this act for a group of immigrants in northern Texas. So they’re siding with a group of Venezuelans in Texas who were worried that they were going to be imminently removed under this authority.

So, it’s taking this issue and sending it back down to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals to decide certain questions, important questions here. Particularly about how much notice these individuals receive in terms of the process that they are due. This is one of the issues that has come up in a lot of these cases. Now, while this is, again, a significant loss for the president, this is temporary and this underlying legal fight continues to play out across the country.

“Paula Reid, thanks very much for that update and please do stand by for us. I want to bring in now CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig. Ellie, thank you so much for jumping in front of a camera for us with this breaking news. What do you make of it? I think worth noting, of course, that we did have two justices, conservative justices making their dissent known,” Hunt added.

“Yeah, Kasie, so this goes back to Trump’s effort to deport alleged gang members of Tren de Aragua Gang under the Alien Enemies Act. Now, this is a 1798 act, passed in the year 1798, to be clear, that says that the administration can deport non-citizens if they are part of an invasion or an alien incursion in the United States,” Honig explained, adding:

Now, the Trump administration is trying to apply that for the first time in history to a non-war time scenario. All the prior times that it was applied have been during the War of 1812, World War I, and World War II.

Now, a federal district court judge in Texas, a Trump appointee, in fact, found that the presence of a gang or illegal aliens in the United States is not what that law means by an invasion, and at this point, with today’s ruling, the Supreme Court has decided we’re not going to overrule that, we’re going to send it back down to continue through the normal appellate process to decide, A, whether the Alien Enemies Act applies, and B, if it does, how much notice, how much due process do people get to challenge it?

Watch the clip above via CNN.