Trump administration deports gang members, despite court order

The Trump administration arrested nearly 300 members of the Tren De Aragua gang over the weekend with plans to deport them, according to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt. President Donald Trump invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act on Saturday to give law enforcement greater powers to arrest and deport members of the designated terror group from the United States.

The administration flew hundreds of suspected terrorists to El Salvador on Saturday evening, around the time U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg ordered a two-week pause to the deportations. Officials paid El Salvador to hold over 230 Tren De Aragua gang members in a terrorist prison for at least a year, according to the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele. The DOJ also shipped 23 wanted members of the Salvadoran MS-13 gang back to El Salvador, Bukele said.

Boasberg verbally indicated from the bench that flights that already left with the suspected terrorists must turn back to the United States, according to courtroom reporting by CBS. However, his comment was excluded from the summary of the written order.

Who is suing to keep gang members in the country? Attorneys for the American Civil Liberties Union and the nonprofit Democracy Forward on Saturday filed the federal lawsuit on behalf of five of the deportees. The plaintiffs objected to the president’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act. The Trump administration's use of wartime authority to enforce immigration law is unprecedented and illegal, according to ACLU lead counsel Lee Gelernt. The United States has not been invaded but the president is using wartime law to accelerate his authoritarian agenda, according to Democracy Forward CEO Skye Perryman.

How has the White House responded? Leavitt denied allegations that the administration refused to comply with the order. The gang members had already been removed from the country when the order was issued, she wrote Monday. A lone judge in a single city can’t dictate the movements of an aircraft full of alien terrorists who were physically expelled from the country, she added. U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi also filed a Sunday notice objecting to the court’s jurisdictional claim. This federal order risked public safety and infringed on presidential powers, according to a Saturday statement from Bondi.

The ACLU filed a response to Trump’s objection on Monday and insisted that the administration had violated the federal order. The ACLU’s filing also requested that the court order federal officials to give sworn testimony on the timing of the flights’ departures in relation to Boasberg’s initial verbal order, as opposed to the final written order.

Has the court responded to the alleged violation? In a Monday evening hearing, Judge Boasberg questioned Trump administration attorneys over why the administration ignored his verbal instructions to turn the planes around.  An attorney for the administration again argued that only Boasberg's written order was pertinent, and by the time it was issued, it was too late to redirect the planes, according to a report by the Associated Press. An attorney for the ACLU said the organization planned to ask the judge to order any improperly deported people back to the United States, the Associated Press reported.