The Trump administration has transferred hundreds of immigrants to El Salvador even as a federal judge issued an order temporarily barring the deportations under an 18th century wartime declaration targeting Venezuelan gang members, officials said Sunday. Flights were in the air at the time of the ruling.
\nUS District Judge James E. Boasberg issued an order Saturday blocking the deportations but lawyers told him there were already two planes with immigrants in the air \u2014 one headed for El Salvador, the other for Honduras. Boasberg verbally ordered the planes be turned around, but they apparently were not and he did not include the directive in his written order.
\n\u201cOopsie\u2026Too late,\u201d Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, a Trump ally who agreed to house about 300 immigrants for a year at a cost of $6 million in his country\u2019s prisons, wrote on the social media site X above an article about Boasberg\u2019s ruling. That post was recirculated by White House communications director Steven Cheung.
\nSecretary of State Marco Rubio, who negotiated an earlier deal with Bukele to house immigrants, posted on the site: \u201cWe sent over 250 alien enemy members of Tren de Aragua which El Salvador has agreed to hold in their very good jails at a fair price that will also save our taxpayer dollars.\u201d
\nSteve Vladeck, a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, said that Boasberg\u2019s verbal directive to turn around the planes was not technically part of his final order but that the Trump administration clearly violated the \u201cspirit\u201d of it.
\n\u201cThis just incentivizes future courts to be hyper specific in their orders and not give the government any wiggle room,\u201d Vladeck said.<\/p>\n
The Department of Justice in court papers filed Sunday said some immigrants were already out of the country by the time the hold was issued Sunday night. The department added that it has appealed the order and would use other laws for deportations in coming days if the appeal is not successful.
\nThe immigrants were deported after Trump\u2019s declaration of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which has been used only three times in US history.
\nThe law, invoked during the War of 1812 and World Wars I and II, requires a president to declare the United States is at war, giving him extraordinary powers to detain or remove foreigners who otherwise would have protections under immigration or criminal laws. It was last used to justify the detention of Japanese-American civilians during World War II.
\nA Justice Department spokesperson on Sunday referred to an earlier statement from Attorney General Pam Bondi blasting Boasberg\u2019s ruling and didn\u2019t immediately answer questions about whether the administration ignored the court\u2019s order.
\nVenezuela\u2019s government in a statement Sunday rejected the use of Trump\u2019s declaration of the law, characterizing it as evocative of \u201cthe darkest episodes in human history, from slavery to the horror of the Nazi concentration camps.\u201d
\nTren de Aragua originated in an infamously lawless prison in the central state of Aragua and accompanied an exodus of millions of Venezuelans, the overwhelming majority of whom were seeking better living conditions after their nation\u2019s economy came undone last decade. Trump seized on the gang during his campaign to paint misleading pictures of communities that he contended were \u201ctaken over\u201d by what were actually a handful of lawbreakers.
\nThe Trump administration has not identified the immigrants deported, provided any evidence they are in fact members of Tren de Aragua or that they committed any crimes in the United States. It did also send two top members of the Salvadoran MS-13 gang to El Salvador who had been arrested in the United States.
\nVideo released by El Salvador\u2019s government Sunday showed men exiting airplanes into an airport tarmac lined by officers in riot gear. The men, who had their hands and ankles shackled, struggled to walk as officers pushed their heads down to have them bend down at the waist.
\nThe video also showed the men being transported to prison in a large convoy of buses guarded by police and military vehicles and at least one helicopter. The men were shown kneeling on the ground as their heads were shaved before they changed into the prison\u2019s all-white uniform \u2013 knee-length shorts, T-shirt, socks and rubber clogs \u2013 and placed in cells.
\nThe immigrants were taken to the notorious CECOT facility, the centerpiece of Bukele\u2019s push to pacify his once violence-wracked country through tough police measures and limits on basic rights
\nThe Trump administration said the president actually signed the proclamation contending Tren de Aragua was invading the United States Friday night but didn\u2019t announce it until Saturday afternoon. Immigration lawyers said that, late Friday, they noticed Venezuelans who otherwise couldn\u2019t be deported under immigration law being moved to Texas for deportation flights. They began to file lawsuits to halt the transfers.
\n\u201cBasically any Venezuelan citizen in the US may be removed on pretext of belonging to Tren de Aragua, with no chance at defense,\u201d Adam Isacson of the Washington Office for Latin America, a human rights group, warned on X.
\nThe litigation that led to the hold on deportations was filed on behalf of five Venezuelans held in Texas who lawyers said were concerned they\u2019d be falsely accused of being members of the gang. Once the act is invoked, they warned, Trump could simply declare anyone a Tren de Aragua member and remove them from the country.
\nBoasberg barred those Venezuelans\u2019 deportations Saturday morning when the suit was filed, but only broadened it to all people in federal custody who could be targeted by the act after his afternoon hearing. He noted that the law has never before been used outside of a congressionally-declared war and that plaintiffs may successfully argue Trump exceeded his legal authority in invoking it.
\nThe bar on deportations stands for up to 14 days and the immigrants will remain in federal custody during that time. Boasberg has scheduled a hearing Friday to hear additional arguments in the case.
\nHe said he had to act because the immigrants whose deportations may actually violate the US Constitution deserved a chance to have their pleas heard in court.
\n\u201cOnce they\u2019re out of the country,\u201d Boasberg said, \u201cthere\u2019s little I could do.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Trump administration has transferred hundreds of immigrants to El Salvador even as a federal judge issued an order temporarily barring the deportations under an 18th century wartime declaration targeting Venezuelan gang members, officials said Sunday. Flights were in the air at the time of the ruling. US District Judge James E. Boasberg issued an …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":78503,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-78491","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78491","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=78491"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78491\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":78506,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78491\/revisions\/78506"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/78503"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=78491"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=78491"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=78491"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}