Venezuelans deported under 1798 US law
The Trump administration has transferred hundreds of immigrants to El Salvador despite a federal judge’s order temporarily barring the deportations under an 18th century wartime declaration targeting Venezuelan gang members, officials said on Sunday. Flights were in the air at the time of the ruling.
US District Judge James Boasberg issued an order on Saturday evening blocking the deportations but lawyers told him there were already two planes with migrants in the air—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.
“Oopsie … Too late,” Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, a Trump ally who agreed to house about 300 migrants for a year at a cost of $6 million in his country’s prisons, wrote on the social media site X above an article about Boasberg’s ruling. That post was recirculated by White House communications director Steven Cheung.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who negotiated an earlier deal with Bukele to house migrants, posted on the site: “We 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.”
1798 law
The migrants were deported after Trump’s declaration of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which has been used only three times in US history.
The law, invoked during World Wars I and II and the War of 1812, 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.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which filed the lawsuit that led to Boasberg’s temporary restraining order on deportations, said it was asking the government whether the removals to El Salvador were in defiance of the court.
“This morning, we asked the government to assure the Court that its order was not violated and are waiting to hear, as well as trying to do our own investigation,” ACLU’s lead lawyer, Lee Gelernt, said in a statement Sunday.
