The Supreme Court blocked the Trump administration from deporting a second wave of Venezuelan immigrants under the Alien Enemies Act after lawyers rushed to the court and alleged that the administration was about to send dozens or hundreds of detainees to El Salvador in defiance of an earlier ruling by the justices.
In a brief order released at about 1 a.m. Saturday, the court directed the administration to temporarily halt any plan to deport a group of Venezuelan nationals who have been detained in northern Texas and have been designated as “alien enemies.”
Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented. Alito indicated he would issue a fuller statement later.
The high court’s order followed hours of frantic litigation involving courts in Texas, Louisiana and Washington, D.C., as lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union battled to stave off what they said appeared to be imminent deportations of Venezuelan men the administration has gathered at an immigration detention center just north of Abilene, Texas.
The men had been given terse deportation notices and were being “loaded on to buses, presumably headed to the airport,” the ACLU lawyers wrote in an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court Friday evening.
President Donald Trump has deployed the Alien Enemies Act — a war power last invoked during World War II — to summarily deport foreign nationals he has labeled members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, which Trump has designated a terrorist organization. Last month, in the first wave of deportations under the act, he sent more than 130 Venezuelan men to a notorious prison in El Salvador with little or no due process.
In an April 7 ruling, the justices said that anyone labeled an “alien enemy” by the Trump administration must be given notice and a meaningful opportunity to contest their deportation in court. ACLU lawyers wrote on Friday that, by preparing a fresh wave of rapid deportations, the administration was defying the Supreme Court’s command in its earlier ruling.
At an emergency hearing Friday evening before U.S. District Judge James Boasberg in Washington, a Justice Department lawyer said he had spoken with Homeland Security officials and was told that they were “not aware of any current plans” for deportations on Saturday.
But the lawyer, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Drew Ensign, added: “I’ve also been told to say they reserve the right to remove people tomorrow.” Notably, Ensign was the same lawyer who told Boasberg last month that he was unaware of any plans to deport Venezuelans under the Alien Enemies Act — even while two planes carrying deportees were en route to El Salvador.
Around the same time that the ACLU filed its emergency appeal at the Supreme Court, it filed a similar motion asking Boasberg to block the deportations himself.
“I do not think that the Supreme Court anticipated that its ruling would be ignored like this,” ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt told Boasberg during the hearing held Friday evening by videoconference.
Boasberg said he was deeply troubled by the deportation notices that were given to Venezuelan nationals detained in Texas. Those notices, he said, do not appear to comply with the Supreme Court’s requirement that detainees be given meaningful due process.
But Boasberg declined to issue a restraining order to halt any deportations over the weekend. He said he had no authority to do so under a different part of the Supreme Court’s April 7 ruling, which mandated that challenges to the deportations under the Alien Enemies Act must be filed in the jurisdictions where the individuals are detained.
The Department of Homeland Security on Friday denied that it had any plans to defy the courts.
“We are not going to reveal the details of counterterrorism operations, but we are complying with the Supreme Court’s ruling,” DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement issued Friday afternoon, referring to the high court’s April 7 ruling.
The extraordinary and fast-moving developments come as Trump has made deportations to the Salvadoran prison the highest-profile piece of his immigration policy. El Salvador President Nayib Bukele has welcomed the deportations to his country, and he has helped Trump sidestep orders demanding due process for those delivered to his maximum-security anti-terrorism confinement center.
Bukele has directly mocked U.S. judges as they’ve attempted to elicit details of the administration’s deportation plans, and he has amplified calls by Trump allies to impeach judges who stand in his way.
Democrats, legal scholars and some judges have warned that the nation may be nearing a constitutional crisis stemming from the administration’s attempts to evade court orders related to deportations — particularly its refusal to facilitate the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador last month.
Meanwhile, lawyers and outside experts have found that there is scant evidence of any gang affiliation for some of the people targeted by the Alien Enemies Act. There are serious questions whether the people already deported — who are being held incommunicado in Bukele’s prison — will ever have a chance to challenge their confinement.
In Trump’s first round of deportations under the AEA on March 15, the administration quickly whisked two planes carrying deportees out of the country. Lawyers tried to halt those deportations in an emergency lawsuit before Boasberg.
The Trump administration did not comply with Boasberg’s order that day to turn the planes around, and Boasberg earlier this week ruled that there is probable cause to hold administration officials in criminal contempt for what he called a “willful disregard” of that order.
The administration appealed Boasberg’s contempt-related ruling. And on Friday, a panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals issued an “administrative” order putting the ruling on hold while the appeals court considers the issue further.
Several other lawsuits have emerged across the country in recent days, including in Texas, Colorado, New York and California, with Venezuelan nationals saying they fear being deported in a matter of hours without a chance to challenge the administration’s designations.
The Trump administration agreed not to deport the individual immigrants who brought those court actions while their cases were pending, but declined to agree to any halt covering broader groups of detainees.
Thomas and Alito, the justices who dissented from the Supreme Court’s one-page order, did not immediately explain their views, but the court indicated Alito would issue a statement soon laying out his position. The court’s order was issued at about the same time that a panel of the New Orleans-based 5th Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed an emergency effort by lawyers for the Venezuelan men to block the summary deportations.
Giselle Ruhiyyih Ewing contributed to this report.