Judge Rejects Trump’s Request to Allow Deportations Under Wartime Law
A federal judge rejected a request from the Trump administration to lift a court order preventing it from using an 18th century wartime law to deport people to a Salvadoran hard labor prison without due process.
President Donald Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act earlier this month to deport to El Salvador hundreds of people that the government claims are members of Tren de Aragua, a transnational criminal organization, while denying them the ability to challenge that designation.
District Judge James Boasberg said he in part rejected the Trump administration’s request because there is “a strong public interest in preventing the mistaken deportation of people based on categories they have no right to challenge.”
Boasberg, who was appointed to the D.C. District Court by former President Barack Obama but who was also appointed to D.C. Superior Court by former President George W. Bush, said the five Venezuelans represented by Democracy Forward* and the ACLU who sued over deportations under the AEA were likely to win.
“Plaintiffs are likely to succeed on another equally fundamental theory: before they may be deported, they are entitled to individualized hearings to determine whether the Act applies to them at all,” Boasberg said.
Boasberg defended his previous order preventing deportations under the AEA, saying that it only applied to using the AEA to initiate deportations. The Trump administration has still been able to carry out deportations under other federal laws.
The judge noted that before Trump had invoked the act, members of Tren de Aragua were all already deportable as members of a designated foreign terrorist organization.
Boasberg’s order sparked an immense amount of condemnation from Trump and his allies. They have called for the judge’s impeachment, while Attorney General Pam Bondi in an official statement from the DOJ claimed the judge supported terrorism by issuing his order.
Plaintiffs in the case have argued that many of the people sent to the Salvadoran prison were not members of Tren de Aragua but were immigrants who could be tortured or killed in the prison.
The Trump administration has maintained in court filings that those removed were “carefully vetted” and posed “an extraordinary threat to the American public.”
However, it has also said many of those “removed under the [Alien Enemies Act] do not have criminal records in the United States” and that the government lacks “specific information about each individual.”
*Democracy Docket Founder Marc Elias is the chair of Democracy Forward’s board.