Thursday, a federal judge in Texas said that the Trump administration can’t use an 18th-century law that was meant to be used against people from a hostile foreign country during a declared war or military invasion as a reason to deport undocumented immigrants in the U.S. who are said to be part of the violent Tren de Aragua gang in Venezuela.
The judge’s decision means that the Department of Homeland Security will never be able to free immigrants detained under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act in the Southern District of Texas, which covers Houston. His decision is a big setback for the Trump administration’s plan to use an old law to send people accused of being part of a Venezuelan gang to a notoriously large prison in El Salvador.
Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr. of the U.S. District Court said that the “plain ordinary meaning” of the act’s words, such as “invasion” and “predatory incursion” by “military forces,” does not match up with what President Trump said about Tren de Aragua’s actions in a proclamation on March 14 that used the Alien Enemies Act. Trump said that members of the gang should be kicked out of the country because they were “conducting irregular warfare” against the US on the orders of Nicolas Maduro, the leader of Venezuela.
The judge said in a 36-page order that the executive branch could not use the A.E.A. to detain the named petitioners and the certified class or to remove them from the country because of the proclamation. The order also included a permanent injunction against deportations under the act.
The Justice Department is likely to file an appeal of Rodriguez’s decision. Trump chose Rodriguez to be a federal judge during his first term as president. The Trump administration is going after illegal immigrants hard, and they have focused on Venezuelan gang members by using the 1798 act, which has only been used three times in U.S. history: during the War of 1812 and World Wars I and II.
In Texas, New York, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Washington, and Georgia, the American Civil Liberties Union has sued at least eight times against the Alien Enemies Act so far. In six of those cases, federal judges have given temporary orders that stop the government from using them to send Venezuelans to prison in El Salvador on charges they are part of Tren de Aragua.
Rodriguez put out a restraining order last month that said the government couldn’t use the wartime powers act to transfer any Venezuelans being held at a detention center near the southern border. His decision was made in the case of three Venezuelans who had sued to stop being sent to a jail in Salvador. At first, they brought their case to the District of Columbia with two other New York prisoners.
They went to court to challenge the Trump administration’s decision to fly 140 Venezuelans it said were part of the Tren de Aragua to the Terrorism Confinement Center in El Salvador as part of a deal it made with Nayib Bukele, the leader of El Salvador.
But a federal judge said In Washington, D.C., James Boasberg stopped any plans to deport the Venezuelans until it was clear if they were covered by the Alien Enemies Act. The Justice Department was able to get the Supreme Court to lift the stay that Boasberg, a Bush administration nominee, had put in place.
The high court decided in a split 5-4 vote that the Trump administration could keep deporting people under the wartime powers law. However, the Venezuelan immigrants must first be able to question their removals individually by filing habeas corpus petitions in federal court in Texas. While Trump said that the Supreme Court’s decision was a win, lawyers for the Venezuelans at the American Civil Liberties Union also said that the decision was a victory.
In a different case challenging the Alien Enemies Act, lawyers for the Trump administration admitted that immigration officials sent a man from Maryland to the mega jail in El Salvador with members of Tren de Aragua by mistake. The lawyers said the government didn’t have the power to bring him back to the United States, even though they admitted there had been a “administrative error.”
In Maryland, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis told immigration officials to bring Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia back to the United States. The Supreme Court agreed with her and said that the Trump administration needed to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s release from jail in El Salvador. But since the high court’s decision, Trump and other top leaders have not done anything to bring him back to the US.
A government source once said that Abrego Garcia was a member of the Salvadoran gang MS-13. In 2019, an immigration judge stopped his deportation order to El Salvador, which meant that he could stay in the United States.
His lawyers say that in March, immigrant and Customs Enforcement officers stopped Abrego Garcia and “told him that his immigration status had changed.” His wife is a U.S. citizen.
Abrego Garcia, who has a 5-year-old kid, was first detained and then sent to Texas. He was then sent back to El Salvador.
There have been reports in the Miami Herald and other places that many of the Venezuelans sent to El Salvador do not seem to have any crime records in the US or anywhere else. It was found by CBS that three quarters of the guys did not seem to have any criminal records anywhere.