Alien Enemies Act (1798)

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    Read Justice Samuel Alito’s Dissent in the Alien Enemies Act Case

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    4
    A.A.R.P. v. TRUMP
    ALITO, J., dissenting
    with 24 hours to respond, and was poised to rule ex-
    peditiously. See ECF Doc. 41, at 3-4. But the Dis-
    trict Court dissolved the Government’s obligation to
    respond after counsel for applicants filed their hasty
    appeal which, in the District Court’s view, deprived
    it of jurisdiction to rule. Id., at 4-5.
    • The papers before us, while alleging that the appli-
    cants were in imminent danger of removal, provided
    little concrete support for that allegation. Members
    of this Court have repeatedly insisted that an All
    Writs Act injunction pending appeal may only be
    granted when, among other things, “the legal rights
    at issue are indisputably clear and, even then, spar-
    ingly and only in the most critical and exigent cir-
    cumstances.” South Bay United Pentecostal Church
    v. Newsom, 590 U. S.
    (2020) (ROBERTS, C. J.,
    concurring in denial of application for injunctive re-
    lief) (slip op., at 2) (internal quotation marks omit-
    ted) (quoting S. Shapiro, K. Geller, T. Bishop, E.
    Hartnett, D. Himmelfarb, Supreme Court Practice
    §17.4, p. 17-9 (11th ed. 2019)); see also Hobby Lobby
    Stores, Inc. v. Sebelius, 568 U. S. 1401, 1403 (2012)
    (SOTOMAYOR, J., in chambers); Lux v. Rodrigues,
    561 U. S. 1306, 1307 (2010) (ROBERTS, C. J., in
    chambers).
    -”
    • Although this Court did not hear directly from the
    Government regarding any planned deportations
    under the Alien Enemies Act in this matter, an at-
    torney representing the Government in a different
    matter, J. G. G. v. Trump, No. 1:25-cv-766 (DC), in-
    formed the District Court in that case during a hear-
    ing yesterday evening that no such deportations
    were then planned to occur either yesterday, April
    18, or today, April 19.
    •
    Although the Court provided class-wide relief, the More

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      Inside the Urgent Fight Over the Trump Administration’s New Deportation Effort

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      The push to deport a group of Venezuelans raises questions about whether the government is following a Supreme Court order requiring that migrants receive due process.On Thursday evening, lawyers helping Venezuelan immigrants most at risk of being removed under an 18th-century wartime powers act received an ominous alert: U.S. immigration officials were handing out notices at a detention facility in Texas, informing migrants that they were considered enemies under the law and would be removed from the country.“I am a law enforcement officer authorized to apprehend, restrain and remove alien enemies,” read the notice, a copy of which was filed in federal court by the American Civil Liberties Union. “Accordingly, under the Alien Enemies Act, you have been determined to be an alien enemy subject to apprehension, restraint and removal from the United States.”The notice said the migrant could make a phone call but did not specify to whom. The single-page notice also did not mention any way to appeal the order.The Supreme Court ruled this month that migrants must receive advance notice that they are subject to removal under the rarely invoked wartime powers law — and that they must have an opportunity to challenge their removal in court.News of the notices being handed out at the Bluebonnet Detention Facility in Anson, Texas, warning of impending deportations prompted a flurry of legal actions by the A.C.L.U. on Friday in several courts. Early Saturday, the Supreme Court stepped in with unusual speed, ruling that no flights could depart.“The government is directed not to remove any member of the putative class of detainees from the United States until further order of this court,” the court said. It is unclear when the justices will make a ruling on whether deportation flights can continue.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Timeline of the Trump Administration’s Use of the Alien Enemies Act

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      In the 36 days since President Trump invoked a powerful wartime law to deport Venezuelan migrants accused of gang membership, a complex and high-risk legal battle has played out in the federal courts.The Supreme Court has weighed in twice, issuing orders limiting the government’s use of the law, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. The court’s latest order, which came around 1 a.m. on Saturday, blocked the deportations of Venezuelans held in Texas hours after the American Civil Liberties Union said the Trump administration was preparing to expel them without due process.At times, the Trump administration has been accused of disregarding judicial orders as it proceeds with its immigration policies and deportation efforts, deepening legal scholars’ concern that the country could be facing a constitutional crisis.Here is a timeline:March 14: The Trump administration issued an executive order invoking the Alien Enemies Act, but the order was not immediately made public. The proclamation said that the government was targeting the violent Venezuelan street gang Tren de Aragua, which it said was threatening an invasion of the United States. The Alien Enemies Act allows the government to detain and expel immigrants age 14 or older without a court hearing when the United States is invaded or at war. It is the fourth time the law has been invoked in American history.March 15: Fearing that the Trump administration was preparing to immediately expel Venezuelans in custody without hearings, the A.C.L.U. filed a lawsuit in federal court in Washington seeking to block the president from invoking the law. The same day, the administration published the executive order. In a hastily scheduled virtual hearing, a federal judge in Washington, James E. Boasberg, was told by the A.C.L.U. that planes were leaving the United States with Venezuelans. He ordered the government not to deport anyone under the law and to return any planes that had already taken off, “however that’s accomplished.”March 16: On social media, El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, published a video of men being led off a plane in handcuffs and taken into a prison in his country. Mr. Bukele posted an article about Judge Boasberg’s order and wrote, “Oopsie… Too late.” The Trump administration insisted it did not violate Judge Boasberg’s order. The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said in a statement that federal courts “have no jurisdiction” over the president’s handling of foreign affairs.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Appeals Court Pauses for Now Contempt Proposal by Trial Judge

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      A federal appeals court on Friday night put off for the moment a plan by a trial judge to open contempt proceedings to determine whether the Trump administration had violated an order he issued last month stopping flights of Venezuelan migrants from being sent to El Salvador under a powerful wartime statute.In a single-page order, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia said that it was entering what is known as an administrative stay to give itself more time to consider the validity of the contempt proposal by the trial judge, James E. Boasberg.On Wednesday, Judge Boasberg, concerned that the White House had ignored his order to pause all deportation flights headed to El Salvador under the wartime law, known as the Alien Enemies Act, gave Trump officials a choice. He said they could provide the men who were sent without hearings to El Salvador the due process they had been denied or they could face a searching contempt investigation into who among them was responsible for having not complied with his directives.In court papers filed on Friday morning, lawyers for the Justice Department told the appeals court that neither option was acceptable. The lawyers accused Judge Boasberg of overstepping his authority by seeking, on the one hand, to tell the Trump administration how to conduct foreign policy and, on the other, to effectively try to assume the role of an investigating prosecutor.The appeals court made clear that it was not ruling on the merits of the Justice Department’s accusations. The panel simply wanted additional time to consider the complexities of Judge Boasberg’s plan.That plan, laid out in an order this week, suggested that the judge was trying to pin down who in the administration was behind what he called the “willful disregard” of his oral instructions issued during a hearing on March 15. Speaking from the bench that day, he said any deportation flights headed to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act needed to be halted at once and that any planes already in the air should turn around.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Another Lawsuit, This Time in Colorado, Over Trump’s Use of the Alien Enemies Act

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      The American Civil Liberties Union filed another lawsuit on Monday seeking to stop the Trump administration from using a powerful wartime statute to deport to El Salvador immigrants from Venezuelan who have been accused of being violent gang members.The lawsuit, brought in Federal District Court in Colorado, was the third of its kind filed in recent days, joining similar legal challenges that were filed last week in Texas and New York.Lawyers for the A.C.L.U. brought the suit on behalf of two men — known in court papers only by the their initials, D.B.U. and R.M.M. The men claim they have been wrongly accused by the administration of being members of the Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua.Court papers say that D.B.U., 32, was arrested on Jan. 26 at a gathering that federal drug and immigration agents have repeatedly described as a Tren de Aragua party. After his arrest, the papers say, he denied being a member of the gang and has not been charged with any crime.Federal agents arrested R.M.M., 25, last month after they saw him standing with three other Hispanic men near their vehicles outside a residence in Colorado that was under surveillance as part of an investigation into Tren de Aragua, court papers said.R.M.M. has claimed that he had nothing to do with the gang and had gone to the location with friends “to meet a prospective buyer for his vehicle at a public meeting,” the papers said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Case in Texas Could Shed More Light on Invocation of Alien Enemies Act

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      Immigration lawyers are reacting to the Supreme Court’s ruling, which declared that any legal challenges to the Trump administration’s plan to use a wartime statute to deport a group of Venezuelan migrants have to be filed where the men are being held.And as they scrambled to adjust on Tuesday, their efforts could be guided by a similar case that is underway in Federal District Court in Brownsville, Texas. It was filed last month by Daniel Zacarias Matos, a Venezuelan migrant who claimed that the administration tried to deport him — without a hearing or an order of removal — under President Trump’s recent proclamation invoking the wartime law, the Alien Enemies Act.In mid-March, Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr., who is handling the case, issued an order stopping Mr. Zacarias Matos from being deported until he could look deeper into the matter. His lawyers and lawyers for the Justice Department are expected to file dueling court papers this month laying out the details of what happened.While the facts in Mr. Zacarias Matos’s case do not line up exactly with those in the cases of the Venezuelan migrants directly affected by the Supreme Court’s ruling, they could shed light on some of those proceedings as they start to move forward, most likely one by one.According to court papers, Mr. Zacarias Matos came to the United States with his 8-year-old daughter in December 2023, seeking asylum from Venezuela. Federal immigration agents took him into custody in October at the El Paso County Jail after he was arrested on charges of violating the terms of his probation on two, now-dismissed misdemeanor charges, court papers show.Early last month, the papers say, Mr. Zacarias Matos was sent to the El Valle Detention Center in Raymondville, Texas, where the administration was holding scores of Venezuelan migrants they were planning to deport to a prison in El Salvador under the expansive powers of the Alien Enemies Act.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Officials Say Deportees Were Gang Members. So Far, Few Details.

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      Families and immigration lawyers argue not all of the deportees sent to a prison in El Salvador over the weekend had ties to gangs.In the days since the federal government sent hundreds of Venezuelan immigrants to a prison in El Salvador, Washington has been debating whether the White House did indeed defy a federal judge who ordered the deportation flights to turn around and head back to the United States.But beyond the Trump administration’s evident animus for the judge and the court, more basic questions remain unsettled and largely unanswered: Were the men who were expelled to El Salvador in fact all gang members, as the United States asserts, and how did the authorities make that determination about each of the roughly 200 people who were spirited out of the country even as a federal judge was weighing their fate?The Trump White House has said that most of the immigrants deported were members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, which, like many transnational criminal organizations, has a presence in the United States. Amid the record numbers of migrants arriving at the southern border in recent years, the gang’s presence in some American cities became a rallying cry for Donald J. Trump as he campaigned to return to the White House, claiming immigrants were invading the country.After Mr. Trump returned to power in January, Tren de Aragua remained a regular talking point for him and his immigration advisers, and the deportation flights last week were the administration’s most significant move yet to make good on its promise to go after the gang. But officials have disclosed little about how the men were identified as gang members and what due process, if any, they were accorded before being placed on flights to El Salvador, where the authoritarian government, allied with Mr. Trump, has agreed to hold the prisoners in exchange for a multimillion-dollar payment.The Justice Department refused to answer basic inquiries on Monday about the deportations from the federal judge in Washington, D.C., who had ordered the deportation flight to return to the United States. On Tuesday afternoon, he ordered the Justice Department to submit a sealed filing by noon on Wednesday detailing the times at which the planes had taken off, left American airspace and ultimately landed in El Salvador.More than half of the immigrants deported over the weekend were removed using an obscure authority known as the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which the Trump administration says it has invoked to deport suspected Venezuelan gang members age 14 or older with little to no due process. The rarely invoked law grants the president broad authority to remove from the United States citizens of foreign countries whom he defines as “alien enemies,” in cases of war or invasion.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Administration Pushes Back Against Judge’s Orders on Deportations

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      The Trump administration has asked a federal judge to dissolve the orders he put in place this weekend barring it from deporting suspected members of a Venezuelan street gang from the country under a rarely invoked wartime statute called the Alien Enemies Act.The Justice Department also doubled down on its efforts to avoid giving the judge, James E. Boasberg, the detailed information he had requested about the deportations, asking the federal appeals court that sits over him to intervene and put the case on hold.Taken together, the twin moves — made in separate sets of court papers filed late on Monday — marked a continuation of the Trump’s administration’s aggressive attempts to push back against Judge Boasberg, the chief judge of the Federal District Court in Washington, who temporarily halted one of President Trump’s signature deportation policies.The Justice Department has now effectively opened up two fronts in the battle: one challenging the underlying orders that paused, for now, the deportation flights and another seeking to avoid disclosing any information about the flights that could indicate they took place after the judge’s orders stopping them were imposed.Mr. Trump attacked Judge Boasberg in a social media post on Tuesday morning, albeit without naming him, as “a troublemaker and agitator,” and called for his impeachment. Mr. Trump’s remarks came days after he declared during a speech at the Justice Department that criticizing judges should be illegal.The late night filings and Mr. Trump’s verbal assault followed a day of extraordinary tension between the Trump administration and Judge Boasberg, both inside and outside the courtroom.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Timeline of Trump’s Deportation Flights, From Alien Enemies Act to Judge’s Order

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      The federal judge’s ruling was clear: The Trump administration could not use an obscure wartime law from the 18th century to deport people without a hearing.If any planes were already in the air, the judge said, they should turn back.That did not happen. Instead, the Trump administration sent more than 200 migrants to El Salvador over the weekend, including alleged gang members, on three planes.A New York Times review of the flight data showed that none of the planes in question landed in El Salvador before the judge’s order, and that one of them did not even leave American soil until after the judge’s written order was posted online. During a Monday court hearing, a Justice Department lawyer argued that the White House had not defied the order by the judge, James E. Boasberg of the Federal District Court in Washington. The lawyer, Abhishek Kambli, argued that the judge’s decision was not complete until it was codified in written form. And — crucial to the government’s explanation — the written version did not include the specific instruction to turn planes around. Mr. Kambli also argued that while the third plane contained deportees, their cases were not covered by the judge’s order. More