US Supreme Court halts Trump’s deportation of Venezuelans under wartime law

The US Supreme Court ordered the Trump administration to pause the deportation of suspected Venezuelan gang members under a 18th-century wartime law.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) had sued the Trump administration over planned deportations of Venezuelans held in a detention centre in north Texas.

On Saturday, the Supreme Court ordered the government to “not remove any member of the putative class of detainees from the United States until further order of this Court”.

Justice Clarence Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito dissented.

US President Donald Trump had invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act and accused Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua (TdA) of “perpetrating, attempting, and threatening an invasion or predatory incursion” on US territory.

The Trump administration was planning to deport a group of at least 30 Venezuelan men under a rarely invoked wartime statute before the Supreme Court ruled.

“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 brief order said. It noted that an appeals court has yet to act on a similar request.

On Friday afternoon, at least one charter bus rolled up to the Bluebonnet Detention Center in Anson, Texas, a town about 200 miles west of Dallas, where the men are being held.

Administration officials are seeking to deport the men, who they say are members of the Tren de Aragua gang, under a wartime law called the Alien Enemies Act. There are major questions about whether the government has the authority to apply the law to gang members outside of a war situation.

The plaintiffs “ask only that this court preserve the status quo so that proposed class members will not be sent to a notorious prison in El Salvador before the American judicial system can afford them due process,” their lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union wrote in the Supreme Court filing.

In the court order, the justices said that the government should file a response to the ACLU application at the Supreme Court “as soon as possible” once the appeals court has acted.

The Supreme Court action follows an April 7 decision in which the court made it clear that any people the government wants to deport under the Alien Enemies Act need to be given the chance to challenge the decision via habeas corpus petitions.

The case raises questions not just about Trump’s aggressive and unprecedented use of presidential power in invoking the 18th century law, which has been used only when the country was at war, but also about whether his administration is complying with court orders.

In its earlier decision, the Supreme Court faulted a judge in Washington for the way he handled the case but said plaintiffs could sue in the districts in which they are confined. The vote to overturn the lower court was 5-4, with liberal justices joined in part by conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

Litigation continues in a separate case over the Trump administration’s mistaken deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador.

By Agencies