The Trump administration ignored a temporary court order to halt deportation flights of accused Venezuelan gang members — and is vowing to take it up with the highest court in the land.
“This is headed to the Supreme Court. And we’re going to win,” a senior White House official told Axios.
During an emergency hearing on Saturday, US District Judge James Boasberg issued a 14-day restraining order to prevent the administration from evoking the 1789 Alien Enemies Act as justification for deporting illegal immigrants convicted of crimes without hearings.
“Any plane containing these folks that is going to take off or is in the air needs to be returned to the United States however that is accomplished,” Boasberg wrote, according to the Washington Post.
However, a day later, the first flight carrying more than 250 Venezuelan gang members left the US bound for El Salvador, where they were escorted off the plane by heavily armed commandos and brought to the notorious Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT).
The flights included 238 members of the Venezuelan prison gang Tren de Aragua, as well as 23 members of MS-13, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, revealed Sunday morning.
A second official told the outlet that the administration’s justification for ignoring Boasberg’s order was that the ruling didn’t apply because the flights were being flown over international waters, and that his edict came too late to turn the planes around.
“Very important that people understand we are not actively defying court orders,” the official reportedly told the outlet.
Bukele agreed to take in the accused gangbangers after meeting with Secretary of State Marco Rubio last week in exchange for a “relatively low” fee which has not been disclosed.
President Trump shared a dramatic video of the prisoner transport on Truth Social Sunday evening, showing shackled men being roughly led from the planes onto armored troop transport vehicles.
“These are the monsters sent into our Country by Crooked Joe Biden and the Radical Left Democrats. How dare they! Thank you to El Salvador and, in particular, President Bukele, for your understanding of this horrible situation, which was allowed to happen to the United States because of incompetent Democrat leadership. We will not forget!”
The centuries-old wartime law quietly invoked by the Trump administration on Friday has not been utilized since World War II, when it was used to establish a legal framework that enabled the US to place noncitizen Japanese, Germans and Italians in internment camps.
Boasberg’s order, and the Trump administration’s subsequent defiance of it, are setting up a battle between the executive and judicial branches.
“It’s the showdown that was always going to happen between the two branches of government,” a senior White House official told the outlet. “And it seemed that this was pretty clean. You have Venezuelan gang members … These are bad guys, as the president would say.”
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