The Supreme Court has ruled that the Trump administration can keep deporting people to countries they are not from, with as little as 24 hours heads up before their flight, and the court decided this secretly. That sounds crazy, but I will explain.
A docket is a list of cases to be heard by a court. The Supreme Court has two dockets: Merits and Shadow. The merits docket is the normal one. Cases get public hearings, oral arguments, audio is live streamed and posted with the transcript, and the rulings are usually long, thoroughly cited, and you can see how the justices voted.
Shadow docket cases have none of that. The justices meet privately or over email. Decisions are often short and unsigned, so you have no idea who voted which way. It could even just be one justice’s decision. Technically, shadow docket rulings are temporary. They pause or unpause a law or executive order while the challenges to it play out in court.
But it’s still permanent in some ways. Let’s say nine months from now, the Supreme Court rules the other way on these deportations. There will be thousands of people deported during those months to non-native countries. Many of the countries are dangerous, so who knows what could happen to those people by the time the court changes its mind?
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