WASHINGTON>> The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Friday to allow it to use a rarely invoked wartime law to continue to deport Venezuelans with little to no due process.

The emergency application arrived at the court after a federal appeals court kept in place a temporary block on the deportations. In its application to the Supreme Court, lawyers for the administration argued that the matter was too urgent to wait for the case to wind its way through the lower courts. In the government’s application, acting Solicitor General Sarah M. Harris said the case presented “fundamental questions about who decides how to conduct sensitive national-security-related operations in this country.”

“The Constitution supplies a clear answer: the president,” Harris wrote.

The justices set a speedy briefing schedule for the case, asking that lawyers for the immigrants file a response to the government’s application by 10 a.m. Tuesday.

The case will offer a major test of how the nation’s highest court will confront President Donald Trump’s efforts to deport millions of migrants and his hostile posture toward the courts. Trump has called for impeaching a lower-court judge who paused deportations.

The case hinges on the legality of an executive order signed by Trump that invokes the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. The order uses the law to target people believed to be Venezuelan gang members in the United States.

The dispute was set in motion in early February, when Secretary of State Marco Rubio designated Tren de Aragua, a violent Venezuelan street gang, as a foreign terrorist organization.

Meanwhile, The Washington Post on Friday reported that a federal judge issued an emergency order blocking the Trump administration from deporting people to third countries where they are not a citizen before giving them a chance to seek humanitarian protection in the United States. The decision follows threats from Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem that anyone in the U.S. illegally could be sent to one of El Salvador’s prisons.