Chicago Migrants Respond to Explosive Supreme Court Ruling Greenlighting Trump's Third‑Country Deportations

Supreme Court decision elicits fear in Chicago migrants, reignites fierce debate over rights and due‑process protections

Natalie C. Frank. Ph.D 6/26/2025

Kjetil Ree/flicker [CC BY 2.0]

* Initials of migrants interviewed used for anonymity

Chicago— In a 6–3 ruling on Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to restart the practice of sending migrants to third countries meaning countries other than their own, without giving them a chance to challenge the decision in U.S. courts.

Instead of deporting migrants back to their own countries through regular procedures, these faster removals started with a chartered flight in May headed to South Sudan. Migrants, including individuals from Myanmar, Vietnam, Cuba, and other countries, who had been convicted of serious crimes in the U.S., were quickly placed on that flight. After intervention from a federal judge in Boston, the plane was rerouted to a naval base in Djibouti, where those migrants have remained in detention.

But Monday’s Supreme Court decision, issued without explanation on its emergency docket, reversed parts of a ruling by U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy. Murphy had ordered that migrants facing third-country removals must be given proper notice and an opportunity to express concerns about potential dangers like torture—protections normally required under U.S. law and international agreements like the Convention Against Torture. The Court, however, temporarily paused those requirements.

In Chicago, between of August 2022 and August of 2024, over 47,000 migrant came to the Chicago area. Most hoped to make the city their home. They formed communities, joined Chicago communities, struggled and fought to find long term housing and jobs. But then a new administration came to power and their lives became even more uncertain than they'd been before.

The new administration began enacting immigration policies that were a complete 180 from what they had been in the previous administration. There were ICE raids and arrests even in sanctuary cities, efforts to eliminate birthright citizenship, and tactics that involved canceling immigration hearings once the parties were present then arresting them when they left the court. There were fears that parents could be arrested when children were at school or when they went to drop off or pick up their children and that they'd be deported, and separated without the children knowing what had happened.

In Chicago where these actions were in full swing under the new administration, migrants were living in fear, and in hiding while they wrestled with the decision of fighting to remain in the US or turning themselves in and being deported on their own terms.

With recent court rulings, the situation has become even more frightening for migrants as due process and rights normally afforded to migrants were removed. “It’s difficult to overstate how big a deal today’s ruling is, especially in conjunction with the Supreme Court’s two emergency docket rulings last month that, respectively, allowed the Trump administration to cancel temporary protected status for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans and parole for hundreds of thousands of other migrants,” said Steve Vladeck, CNN Supreme Court analyst and a professor at Georgetown University Law Center.

“In those earlier rulings, the court cleared the way for the government to treat as many as a million migrants as removable who previously weren’t. And today’s ruling allows the government to remove those individuals and others to any country that will take them – without providing any additional process beyond an initial removal hearing, and without regard to the treatment they may face in those countries,” Vladeck added.

Chicago migrants are terrified that they could be sent to a different turmoil filled country that they know nothing about.

"We were afraid of being sent back to Venezuela. But at least we knew Venezuela," said RB, who moved to Chicago with his wife three years ago. "Getting sent to South Sudan or somewhere else just as foreign and in as much trouble [turmoil] as Venezuela . . . I just don't know how we could survive there."

Returning to Venezuela is scary for most migrants due to the political instability and punishment of those who don't agree with the government, economic crisis, violent crime and kidnappings. Similar problems exist in South Sudan as well as famine, serious violence, armed conflict and fear that the country will return to civil war.

"We thought we were on the right track," said AR, a woman who came to Chicago from Honduras with her husband and two children in 2023. "We had the date for our hearing. Then just a month before, we found out that it was canceled. We waited so long. It's not right to cancel hearings that already have a date [are scheduled]. The letter said we can't reschedule it and we can be deported though that wasn't supposed to happen. And they're talking about sending us to a different country? We have small children. How will be protect them when we don't know the system.

"I think lots of us thought that if we could get here [to the U.S.] and get to a sanctuary city, we'd be protected by the law," said J.H. a single man who migrated here with several neighbors from Venezuela last year. "We know about the Supreme Court, but it's not like I thought. It's the biggest [highest] court here [in the U.S.] but it seems more interested in getting ride of our rights instead of helping us."