US President Donald Trump’s 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 on Sunday.
Flights were in the air at the time of the ruling.
US District Judge James Boasberg on Saturday issued an order temporarily blocking the deportations, but lawyers told him there were already two planes with immigrants in the air — one headed for El Salvador, the other for Honduras.
Photo: AP / El Savador’s presidential press office
Boasberg verbally ordered the planes be turned around, but they apparently were not and he did not include the directive in his written order.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, in a statement on Sunday, responded to speculation about whether the administration was flouting court orders.
“The administration did not ‘refuse to comply’ with a court order. The order, which had no lawful basis, was issued after terrorist TdA aliens had already been removed from US territory,” she said.
The acronym refers to the Tren de Aragua gang, which Trump targeted in his unusual proclamation that was released on Saturday.
In a court filing on Sunday, the US Department of Justice, which has appealed Boasberg’s decision, said it would not use the Trump proclamation he blocked for further deportations if his decision is not overturned.
Trump sidestepped a question over whether his administration violated a court order while speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One on Sunday evening.
“I don’t know. You have to speak to the lawyers about that,” he said, although he defended the deportations. “I can tell you this. These were bad people.”
Asked about invoking presidential powers used in times of war, Trump said: “This is a time of war,” describing the influx of criminal migrants as “an invasion.”
Trump’s allies were gleeful over the results.
“Oopsie…Too late,” Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, who agreed to house about 300 immigrants for a year at a cost of US$6 million in his country’s prisons, wrote on X above an article about Boasberg’s ruling.
That post was recirculated by White House communications director Steven Cheung.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who negotiated an earlier deal with Bukele to house immigrants, 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.”
Steve Vladeck, a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, said that Boasberg’s verbal directive to turn around the planes was not technically part of his final order, but that the Trump administration clearly violated the “spirit” of it.
“This just incentivizes future courts to be hyper specific in their orders and not give the government any wiggle room,” Vladeck said.
The immigrants 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 the War of 1812 and World Wars I and II, requires a president to declare the US 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.
Venezuela’s government in a statement on Sunday rejected the use of Trump’s declaration of the law, characterizing it as evocative of “the darkest episodes in human history, from slavery to the horror of the Nazi concentration camps.”
Tren 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’s economy came undone during the past decade.
Trump seized on the gang during his campaign to paint misleading pictures of communities that he contended were “taken over” by what were actually a handful of lawbreakers.
The Trump administration has not identified the immigrants deported, provided any evidence they are members of Tren de Aragua or that they committed any crimes in the US. It also sent two top members of the Salvadoran MS-13 gang to El Salvador who had been arrested in the US.
Video released by El Salvador’s government on Sunday showed men exiting airplanes onto 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.
The 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’s all-white uniform — knee-length shorts, T-shirt, socks and rubber clogs — and placed in cells.
The immigrants were taken to the notorious CECOT facility, the centerpiece of Bukele’s push to pacify his once violence-wracked country through tough police measures and limits on basic rights.
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