“This weekend, at the President’s direction, the Department of Homeland Security successfully arrested nearly 300 Tren De Aragua terrorists, saving countless American lives,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Sunday in a statement. “These heinous monsters were extracted and removed to El Salvador where they will no longer be able to pose any threat to the American People.”
The US is paying El Salvador to hold the Venezuelans under an agreement Secretary of State Marco Rubio brokered with the Central American country’s president, Nayib Bukele. Some 238 members of the gang were transferred to a terrorism confinement center, Bukele said on X.
US President Donald Trump on Saturday moved to accelerate the deportations by invoking seldom-used powers under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a statute previously employed to justify the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. The precise timing of the transfers wasn’t immediately clear. The US also has not publicly detailed how it identified the Venezuelans as members of the Tren de Aragua gang that’s been designated a foreign terrorist organisation.
The announcements came as US District Judge James Boasberg barred deportations under Trump’s proclamation for 14 days, allowing time to consider a legal challenge to the move brought by the American Civil Liberties Union and Democracy Forward. In proceedings Saturday, Boasberg said any flights that carried people deported under Trump’s proclamation would have to be returned midair to the US, according to the Associated Press.
The judge’s written order and the Trump administration’s actions aren’t in conflict, Leavitt said Sunday evening. The administration didn’t refuse to comply with a court order, she said, adding: “The order, which had no lawful basis, was issued after terrorist TdA aliens had already been removed from US territory.”
Trump rooted his proclamation in assertions that many of the organization’s members “have unlawfully infiltrated the United States and are conducting irregular warfare and undertaking hostile actions” against the country.
The president also argued Tren de Aragua is engaging in “mass illegal migration to the United States” in a bid to harm the country’s citizens, undermine public safety and support efforts by Venezuela President Nicolas Maduro to destabilize democratic nations.
Trump in his second term has moved to ramp up deportations of undocumented migrants and secure US borders in the wake of an election victory driven partly by voter anxiety over illegal immigration and crime. As in Trump’s first term, courts across the US have slowed or blocked his ability to fully enact his orders.
Under the Alien Enemies Act the president can detain and remove non-citizens of hostile nations in wartime, powers which have been tapped rarely in US history. Opponents argue the authority cannot be used to target members of a criminal enterprise, rather than a country.
The administration asserted in a court filing that some of the deportations happened before the judge’s order. The administration also said it won’t pursue any more removals under the proclamation unless the court intervenes or removes the restraining order.
Five individuals who were subject to an earlier order blocking their removal are still in the US, the administration said in its filing.
The Venezuelan government posted on Telegram that the US proclamation “infamously and unfairly criminalizes” Venezuelan migrants, describing it as recalling “humanity’s most dark moments.”
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