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Late on Saturday night, Justice Samuel Alito released his dissent from the Supreme Court’s order—issued nearly 24 hours earlier—blocking the allegedly impending deportation of Venezuelan migrants under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. It is highly unusual for the court to rush out an order before a dissenting justice has the chance to complete their opinion, reflecting the urgency of its intervention. That delay between the majority’s order and the publication of the dissent gave Alito plenty of time to raise persuasive objections to the court’s ruling. He failed on every level, misstating key points of law in a bid to bail out the president (which was joined only by Justice Clarence Thomas). Perhaps Alito’s most egregious misrepresentation, however, was not legal, but factual: The justice wrote that Trump administration lawyers “informed” a federal judge that “no” deportations “were planned to occur” on Friday or Saturday, so there was no need for emergency action. That is false. And what the Justice Department actually said in court reinforces the wisdom and necessity of the Supreme Court’s dramatic move.

Alito’s claim that there were no “planned” deportations originates from a hearing that U.S. District Judge James Boasberg held in Washington, D.C., on Friday evening. By that point, the American Civil Liberties Union had credible information from multiple sources that the government was loading Venezuelan migrants on buses heading to the Abilene, Texas, airport for rendition flights to El Salvador. These sources confirmed that federal officials had failed to provide these migrants with the due process rights recently afforded to them by the Supreme Court, including a meaningful opportunity to contest their removal. Instead, the government allegedly intended to deport them just 24 hours after coercing them into signing a “notice” in English that failed to inform them of their rights. Despite ample evidence of imminent, unlawful rendition flights, the conservative federal courts in Texas refused to act. The ACLU thus asked Boasberg for an emergency hearing on Friday night, and the judge summoned Justice Department attorney Drew Ensign to explain the administration’s plans.

Ensign’s representations to the court that evening were, as the transcript demonstrates, a master class in hedging and obfuscation. The judge asked Ensign directly and repeatedly whether the administration planned to fly any migrants to El Salvador on Friday or Saturday. Ensign would not give a direct answer. His first response reflected careful ambiguity: “I have also been told that there are no flights tonight and that the people I spoke to were not aware of any plans for flights tomorrow,” he said. Later, he added: “The information that was relayed to me was a definitive There are no flights tonight, and the people I spoke to were not aware of any plans for flights tomorrow.”

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Note the qualifiers and calculated uncertainty. Ensign wasn’t sure, but he had “been told.” The people he “spoke to” were “not aware of any plans.” He was only conveying “the information that was relayed” to him. Sensing this deliberate vagueness, Boasberg adjourned the hearing for 30 minutes so Ensign could gather more information. When it resumed, Ensign told the court: “I have spoken with DHS. They are not aware of any current plans for flights tomorrow, but I have also been told to say that they reserve the right to remove people tomorrow, that that would be consistent with” the Supreme Court’s earlier decision.

Lee Gelernt, the ACLU attorney representing the plaintiffs, was not satisfied with this response. “I think our position would be clear on that,” he told Boasberg. “That doesn’t give us much confidence that there won’t be planes.” Gelernt was right to be skeptical—and to feel, perhaps, that history was repeating itself. On March 15, as the government was preparing its first round of deportations under the Alien Enemies Act, Boasberg held a similar hearing with Gelernt and Ensign. Then, as now, Ensign averred that he had incomplete information, and could only convey what he had been told. Then, as now, Boasberg adjourned to let Ensign gather more details. Then, as now, Ensign came back largely empty-handed, without more substantive information to share.

We now know, though, that the government exploited that adjournment of the March 15 hearing to rush out two flights heading for El Salvador—before Boasberg had a chance to rule. Ensign, who faces criminal contempt for his role in this debacle, insists that he was not aware of the rushed departures. If that’s true, then the Trump administration has already obscured one round of deportation flights from him in the midst of a court proceeding. Why should anyone think it wouldn’t pull the same trick on Friday? Ensign’s representations no longer carry any weight if the government will conceal pertinent information from him that a court wishes to learn.

Layered into this equivocation was an even deeper distortion. Ensign told Boasberg that “the government has no plans to remove anyone that’s filed a habeas petition”—that is, a challenge to their expulsion to El Salvador. But Ensign then admitted that the government is still preventing migrants from filing habeas petitions in the first place. The attorney insisted that despite the Supreme Court’s call for due process, federal officials did not have to inform migrants of their rights, or give them more than 24 hours’ notice before loading them on a flight to El Salvador. This threadbare process, Ensign told Boasberg, satisfied the government’s constitutional obligations. His assurance that “the government has no plans to remove anyone that’s filed a habeas petition” was therefore nearly meaningless given that the government claimed the authority to thwart those petitions from being filed in the first place.

In light of the full context and Ensign’s specific choice of words, Alito was simply wrong to claim that the Justice Department denied plans to fly out migrants on Friday or Saturday. Set aside the fact that DHS “reserve[d] the right to remove people” on Saturday. Set aside the bad-faith scheme hatched by administration officials to sabotage habeas petitions by denying migrants real due process. The truth is that Ensign himself refused to say with certainty that migrants were safe from imminent removal. And just last month, the government allegedly deprived him of real-time information about rendition flights—for the express purpose of hiding those flights from the court. Alito’s confidence that no migrants would be illegally renditioned was not just misplaced, but actively misleading.

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Boasberg ultimately declined to issue a restraining order on Friday, finding that the Supreme Court already tied his hands in this case. When judges in Texas would not act, SCOTUS finally stepped in around 1 a.m. on Saturday morning, halting the flights; a video obtained by NBC News shows buses full of migrants driving to the airport, then turning around shortly before the Supreme Court’s order was released to the public. Guards at the detention facility reportedly told the individuals that they were heading to El Salvador. All available evidence indicates that Ensign’s words were crafted to let the government fly these men to a Salvadoran prison early Saturday morning, then maintain that the flights did not technically conflict with the Justice Department’s claims in court.

More than anything, the Supreme Court’s order reveals that a majority of justices are losing faith in the Trump administration, and not a moment too soon. There’s only one plausible reason why the court would intervene at 1 a.m. on Saturday, before Alito finished his dissent and before the Justice Department even responded to the ACLU’s pleas: It didn’t trust the government to tell the truth or follow the law, including its own directives. It is heartening that a majority has, at long last, evidently recognized that this administration does not deserve the deference that courts usually afford to the executive branch. And it’s damning that Alito and Thomas remain in willful denial about this new reality.

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