Trump administration accused of defying court orders in separate deportation cases
Hundreds of Venezuelans sent to El Salvador, Lebanese doctor turned back from U.S. in separate cases
The Trump 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 Sunday. Flights were in the air at the time of the ruling.
U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg issued an order Saturday 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. Boasberg verbally ordered the planes be turned around, but they apparently were not and he did not include the directive in his written order.
Boasberg scheduled a 4 p.m. ET hearing on Monday and said the government should be prepared to answer a series of questions about the flights laid out in the motion from plaintiffs, which include the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the nonprofit group Democracy Forward.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, in a statement 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 U.S. territory."
The acronym refers to the Tren de Aragua gang, which Trump targeted in his unusual proclamation that was released Saturday
In a court filing Sunday, the 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'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 $6 million US in his country's prisons, wrote on the social media site X above an article about Boasberg's ruling. That post was recirculated by White House communications director Steven Cheung.
U.S. 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."
The deportees were taken to the notorious CECOT facility, the centrepiece of Bukele's push to pacify his once violence-wracked country through tough police measures and limits on basic rights.
The immigrants were deported after Trump's declaration of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which has been used only three times in U.S. history.
The law, invoked during the War of 1812 and World Wars I and II, requires a president to declare the United States 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 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 in fact members of Tren de Aragua or that they committed any crimes in the United States. It also sent two top members of the Salvadoran MS-13 gang to El Salvador who had been arrested in the United States.
Flurry of litigation
Boasberg noted that the Alien Enemies Act has never before been used outside of a congressionally declared war and that plaintiffs may successfully argue Trump exceeded his legal authority in invoking it.
The bar on deportations stands for up to 14 days and the immigrants will remain in federal custody during that time. Boasberg has scheduled a hearing Friday to hear additional arguments in the case.
He said he had to act because the immigrants whose deportations may actually violate the U.S. Constitution deserved a chance to have their pleas heard in court.
"Once they're out of the country," Boasberg said, "there's little I could do."
Rhode Island-based doctor put on flight
Concerns have also been raised in other cases about whether the Trump administration is complying with court rulings.
Dr. Rasha Alawieh, 34, who is an assistant professor at Brown University's medical school in Providence, R.I., has been deported to Lebanon even though a judge had issued an order blocking the U.S. visa holder's immediate removal from the country, according to court papers.
U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin, an appointee of Democratic President Barack Obama, said he had received a "detailed and specific" timeline of the events from a lawyer working on Alawieh's behalf that raised "serious allegations" about whether his order was violated.
Despite the judge's order, according to the cousin's lawyers, Alawieh was flown to Paris, where she was then set to board a flight for Lebanon that had been scheduled for Sunday.
Alawieh, a Lebanese citizen who lives in Providence, R.I., was detained on Thursday after arriving at Logan International Airport in Boston after travelling to Lebanon to see relatives, according to a lawsuit filed by her cousin, Yara Chehab.
Alawieh has held visas to be in the United States since 2018, when she first came to complete a two-year fellowship at Ohio State University before then completing a fellowship at the University of Washington and then moving to the Yale-Waterbury Internal Medicine Program, which she completed in June.
Lawyers for the government explained in a court filing Monday that U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers at Logan did not receive notice of the order until she "had already departed the United States," the judge noted. They asked that the petition be dismissed.
Sorokin put a hearing on her case on hold to give Alawieh's new lawyers time to prepare.
With files from Reuters