As the conservative wing of the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday sided with the Trump administration and stayed a district court”s preliminary injunction pending appeal, liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor sharply criticized the majority for “clos[ing] its eyes” and “rewarding lawlessness” by permitting the government to resume so-called “third-country” deportations.

The court needed five justices to grant the stay, and the nine-member court accomplished that without the help of the dissenting Sotomayor and Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

As recently as early June, immigration lawyers opposing the Trump administration’s stay application urged the high court not to lose sight of the government’s “own choices — to violate the district court’s orders” by moving to “deport two groups of class members to Libya and South Sudan” even after U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy issued the injunction in April.

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At the start of that order, Murphy summarized what the “third-country” deportations entailed, described the stakes as life and death, and remarked confidently on the Supreme Court justices’ views of “basic decency.”

“Defendants argue that the United States may send a deportable alien to a country not of their origin, not where an immigration judge has ordered, where they may be immediately tortured and killed, without providing that person any opportunity to tell the deporting authorities that they face grave danger or death because of such a deportation,” Murphy wrote. “All nine sitting justices of the Supreme Court of the United States, the Assistant Solicitor General of the United States, Congress, common sense, basic decency, and this Court all disagree.”

On Monday, Sotomayor struck a mournful tone as the Supreme Court stayed an injunction that, in her view, had “manage[d] this high-stakes litigation with […] care and attention” and “prevented worse outcomes.” And yet, wrote Sotomayor, the Trump administration won “emergency relief from an order it has repeatedly defied.”

“I cannot join so gross an abuse of the Court’s equitable discretion,” she added.

Writing that the Trump administration “openly flouted two court orders” with “no-notice” deportations, Sotomayor called this “misconduct” a threat to the “core” of the “rule of law.”

Next, the justice issued a dire assessment of the state of affairs.

“This is not the first time the Court closes its eyes to noncompliance, nor, I fear, will it be the last,” Sotomayor said. “Yet each time this Court rewards noncompliance with discretionary relief, it further erodes respect for courts and for the rule of law.”

The Monday lifting of Murphy’s injunction, Sotomayor continued, exposes “thousands to the risk of torture or death.”

In parting shots, Sotomayor likened the Trump administration’s “posture” to that of an “arsonist who calls 911 to report firefighters for violating a local noise ordinance.”

Accusing the Supreme Court of “rewarding lawlessness,” Sotomayor wrote that she had to “[r]espectfully, but regretfully,” dissent.

“Apparently, the Court finds the idea that thousands will suffer violence in farflung locales more palatable than the remote possibility that a District Court exceeded its remedial powers when it ordered the Government to provide notice and process to which the plaintiffs are constitutionally and statutorily entitled,” she concluded. “That use of discretion is as incomprehensible as it is inexcusable.”