Judge defied: court order ignored as Trump deports gang members
The Trump administration has deported alleged Venezuelan gang members despite a court order that blocked it from doing so.
The Trump administration has deported alleged Venezuelan gang members under a centuries-old wartime law, despite a court order that temporarily blocked it from doing so.
US District Judge James Boasberg on Saturday evening blocked President Donald Trump from using the law known as the Alien Enemies Act to deport non-citizens held in US custody. Government lawyers said Mr Trump was using the law to target members of Tren de Aragua, a violent Venezuelan gang whose members have reached the US in recent years.
During Saturday’s hearing, American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Lee Gelernt told Judge Boasberg that two aircraft believed to be carrying Venezuelan deportees took off from US territory on Saturday. The ACLU had sued the administration earlier that day on behalf of migrants at risk of deportation.
Judge Boasberg said Justice Department lawyers hadn’t disputed that claim, and told them that “any plane containing these folks that is going to take off or is in the air needs to be returned to the United States”.
He said his order was “something we need to make sure is complied with immediately”.
The judge subsequently issued a written order that didn’t explicitly mention planes that were already in the air, something White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt appeared to point to on Sunday (Monday AEDT).
“The administration did not ‘refuse to comply’ with a court order,” Ms Leavitt said, adding that it “was issued after terrorist TdA aliens had already been removed from US territory. The written order and the administration’s actions do not conflict.”
Typically lawyers view orders issued orally by judges as carrying full legal weight.
Senior White House and administration officials huddled on Saturday evening to make a decision about what to do with the judge’s order, and decided to go ahead with their plans, according to a person familiar with the matter. The administration is expecting a fight at the Supreme Court quickly, this person said.
Axios earlier reported that the White House decided to press ahead. During the emergency court hearing, Judge Boasberg said he hadn’t reached any final conclusions on whether Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act was lawful. But he said his temporary restraining order, which will be in effect for 14 days, will preserve the status quo until he can hear arguments more fully.
The Justice Department swiftly asked a federal appeals court to lift Judge Boasberg’s restraining order. And in a court filing on Sunday, the administration said that it had deported some alleged gang members before the court’s Saturday evening order. It also indicated that it planned to continue to deport migrants it deems a threat to the US on other legal grounds.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on X on Sunday that the administration had sent two leaders of the MS-13 gang and “21 of its most wanted,” as well as over 250 members of Tren de Aragua, to El Salvador.
Mr Rubio also reposted a comment from El Salvador’s President, Nayib Bukele, that said “oopsie … too late” in reference to a news article about the judge’s order halting the deportations.
Mr Bukele shared a video with three planes on a dark tarmac that he said showed gang members being escorted off the planes by security services. The video showed a blue plane with a GlobalX logo, a white plane with a GlobalX logo, and a white plane with a logo for Global Crossing Airlines, which is operated by GlobalX. (Last year, GlobalX won a $US65m contract to operate charter flights for ICE.) Flight tracking data from flightradar24, a global flight tracking service, shows that three planes fitting those descriptions left the US on Saturday evening and continued on to Honduras before travelling to El Salvador, all landing well after the judge issued his order.
One of the planes was still on the ground in Harlingen, Texas, an airport that has become a hub for deportation flights, when the judge verbally issued the order around 6.45pm. Mr Bukele’s video shows men being escorted off that plane, which departed Texas at about 7.35pm and landed in El Salvador at 1.10am, according to flightradar24’s tracking information. The country of origin of those men couldn’t be determined.
Two other flights had departed Harlingen about an hour earlier, and were more than five hours from arriving in El Salvador at the time of the order.
The Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the State Department didn’t respond to a request for comment. GlobalX didn’t respond to a voicemail seeking comment.
Mr Trump’s proclamation that he was invoking the Alien Enemies Act, released by the White House on Saturday, stated that Tren de Aragua was “undertaking hostile actions and conducting irregular warfare against the territory of the United States both directly and at the direction, clandestine or otherwise, of the Maduro regime in Venezuela”.
The Alien Enemies Act was first passed in 1798 and has been seldom used since. The law, which allows a president during wartime to deport citizens of countries considered an enemy of the US, was last invoked in World War II as the legal authority for interning noncitizens of Japanese, German and Italian descent.
The administration hopes invoking the act will give it broad power to arrest and deport certain immigrants in the country illegally without a hearing in immigration court, essentially denying them due process before they are removed. Trump has grown frustrated with his team at the pace of deportations so far.
The Wall Street Journal
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