Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett has broken with her fellow conservatives on another high-profile challenge to the Trump administration.
The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 Monday that President Donald Trump could resume deportations of Venezuelans accused of being members of the Tren de Aragua gang, but with an important caveat: The alleged gang members must be given a chance to seek judicial review before they are deported.
Coney Barrett, however, sided with the court’s three liberal justices to co-sign key parts of Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s blistering dissent.
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The four female justices argued that continuing the deportations while courts weigh the relevant legal questions could “have life or death consequences” for the detainees sent to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT mega-prison.
“The the Court’s decision to intervene in this litigation is as inexplicable as it is dangerous,” Sotomayor wrote in the dissent, which was also co-signed by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “The Government’s conduct in this litigation poses an extraordinary threat to the rule of law.”
It’s not the first time Coney Barrett has risked the ire of the MAGAverse.
In March, she and Chief Justice John Roberts joined the court’s three liberal justices in holding that Elon Musk’s nebulous cost-cutting initiative DOGE could not unilaterally freeze $2 billion in congressionally approved aid for work that had already been completed.
The decision left in place a lower court ruling unfreezing the aid, sending MAGA into meltdown mode. Right-wing influencers Mike Cernovich and Jack Posobiec branded her a DEI hire, while others called her a disgrace.
“She is evil, chosen solely because she checked identity politics boxes,” Cernovich wrote. “Another DEI hire. It always ends badly.”
Notably, Roberts was not accused of being a turncoat—just Coney Barrett.
Paul A. Szypula labeled her “disgraceful” and added that she is “a bad SCOTUS nominee.”
“Looking that way,” conservative activist Charlie Kirk agreed.
And ye, when Coney Barrett voted in 2022 to overturn Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court case that established a constitutional right to an abortion, Kirk hailed the court’s decision as a “monumental miracle” from God.
After last month’s massive backlash to the one, relatively narrow decision MAGA disagreed with, Trump defended Coney Barrett from his base.
“She’s very smart, and I don’t know about people attacking her,” he told reporters aboard Air Force One. “I think she’s a very good woman. She’s very smart.”
