President Donald Trump recently pushed for the deportation of American-born criminals and expansion of detention facilities in El Salvador. The administration has already deported over 200 migrants to El Salvador. Attorney Alan Dershowitz said the Supreme Court will likely block efforts to transfer American inmates to foreign prisons with abusive conditions.
Newly uncovered guidance from the Justice Department claims the Alien Enemies Act (AEA) allows federal law enforcement officers to enter the houses of suspected gang members without a warrant and remove them from the country without any judicial review.
In a March 14 memorandum, obtained by the open government group Property of the People through a public records request and first reported by USA Today, Attorney General Pam Bondi [Bimbo #3] instructs federal law enforcement officers on how to carry out arrests on members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua (TDA), which President Donald Trump has declared are “alien enemies” under the AEA.
The Trump administration has refused to disclose many of the operational details of its unprecedented invocation of the 1798 wartime law to send alleged TDA members to a prison in El Salvador under an agreement with that country’s president, Nayib Bukele. The memo is one of the first public glimpses at the Trump administration’s claims that it can identify, pursue, arrest, and deport migrants, unconstrained by the Fourth Amendment or due process.
Warning that the executive branch’s claims should shock “the intuitive sense of liberty” of Americans, a panel of judges for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit today unanimously rejected the Trump administration’s attempts to stay a lower court order to release Kilmar Abrego Garcia from a prison camp in El Salvador.
The U.S. Supreme Court ordered the Trump administration last week to facilitate the release of Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran man that three government officials admitted was mistakenly sent to El Salvador’s most notorious prison, along with several hundred other alleged gang members. However, the Trump administration has done nothing to comply with that order; it insists it has no power to return Abrego Garcia from another sovereign state—nor does a court have the authority to force it to do so.
When the federal district judge overseeing Abrego Garcia’s case attempted to enforce the Supreme Court’s order, the Trump administration requested an emergency stay from the Fourth Circuit Court.
Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson, a Ronald Reagan appointee to the Fourth Circuit, wrote that allowing the administration’s passive interpretation of “facilitate” would “reduce the rule of law to lawlessness and tarnish the very values for which Americans of diverse views and persuasions have always stood.”
“It is difficult in some cases to get to the very heart of the matter,” Wilkinson wrote. “But in this case, it is not hard at all. The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order. Further, it claims in essence that because it has rid itself of custody that there is nothing that can be done.”
“This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear,” Wilkinson warned.
Trump administration officials have made no secret of its contempt for the concept of due process.
