The U.S. Supreme Court on Saturday temporarily blocked the deportations of any Venezuelans held in northern Texas under an 18th-century wartime law.
In a brief order, the court directed the Trump administration not to remove Venezuelans held in the Bluebonnet Detention Center “until further order from this court.”
Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented.
The high court acted overnight following an emergency appeal from the American Civil Liberties Union, contending that immigration authorities appeared to be moving to restart removals under the Alien Enemies Act (AEA) of 1798. The Supreme Court had said earlier in April that deportations could proceed only if those about to be removed had a chance to argue their case in court and were given “a reasonable time” to contest their pending removals.
“These men were in imminent danger of spending their lives in a horrific foreign prison without ever having had a chance to go to court,” ACLU lawyer Lee Gelernt told CBS News in a statement on Saturday. “We are relieved that the Supreme Court has not permitted the administration to whisk them away the way others were just last month.”
On Friday, two federal judges refused to step in as lawyers for the men launched a desperate legal campaign to prevent their deportation. Early Saturday, the 5th U.S. Court of Appeals refused to issue an order protecting the detainees from being deported.
The administration is expected to return to the Supreme Court quickly in an effort to persuade the justices to lift their temporary order.
The ACLU had already sued to block deportations of two Venezuelans held in the Bluebonnet facility and sought an order barring removals of any immigrants in the region under the Alien Enemies Act.
In an emergency filing early Friday, the ACLU said it heard from lawyers and relatives of some of the men held at the detention center in Ansen, Texas that immigration authorities were accusing the men of being members of the Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan gang President Trump has made into a focal point of his crackdown on illegal immigration. The organization, citing lawyers and family members, said some of them had been given notices telling them they were slated to be deported under the wartime law.
Citing the March 15 deportations of scores of migrants who were taken to El Salvador’s notorious Center for the Confinement of Terrorism, or CECOT, mega-prison, the ACLU implored U.S. District Court Judge James Wesley Hendrix to act quickly.
“(G)iven the brutal nature of the Salvadoran prison where other Venezuelan men were sent under the (Alien Enemies Act) last month, the irreparable harm to them is manifest,” the ACLU’s emergency motion said.
Mr. Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act in March to order officials to immediately detain and remove Venezuelan migrants with alleged ties to Tren de Aragua, arguing that they were invading or staging an incursion into the U.S.
The act has only been invoked three previous times in U.S. history, most recently during World War II to hold Japanese-American civilians in internment camps. The Trump administration contended the AEA gave it the power to swiftly remove immigrants it identified as members of the gang, regardless of their immigration status.
Following the unanimous high court order on April 9, federal judges in Colorado, New York and southern Texas promptly issued orders barring the removal of detainees under the AEA until the administration provides a process for them to make claims in court.
But there had been no such order issued in the area of Texas that covers Bluebonnet, which is located 24 miles north of Abilene in the far northern end of the state.
Judge Hendrix, a Trump appointee, this week declined to bar the administration from removing the two men identified in the ACLU lawsuit because Immigration and Customs Enforcement filed sworn declarations that they would not be immediately deported. He also balked at issuing a broader order prohibiting the removal of all Venezuelans in the area under the act because he said removals hadn’t started yet.
But the ACLU’s Friday filing included sworn declarations from three separate immigration lawyers who said their clients in Bluebonnet were given paperwork indicating they were members of Tren de Aragua and could be deported by Saturday.
An attorney for the Legal Aid Society said her client refused to sign papers he was given by the detention facility staff because they were in English and he could not understand what they said.
Gelernt said in a Friday evening hearing before District Judge James E. Boasberg in Washington, D.C., that the administration initially moved Venezuelans to its south Texas immigration facility for deportation. But since a judge banned deportations in that area, it has funneled them to the Bluebonnet facility, where no such order exists. He said witnesses reported the men were being loaded on buses Friday evening to be taken to the airport.
With Hendrix not agreeing to the ACLU’s request for an emergency order, the group turned to Boasberg, who initially halted deportations in March. The Supreme Court ruled the orders against deportation could only come from judges in jurisdictions where immigrants were held, which Boasberg said made him powerless on Friday.
“I’m sympathetic to everything you’re saying,” Boasberg told Gelernt. “I just don’t think I have the power to do anything about it.”
Boasberg this week found there’s probable cause that the Trump administration committed criminal contempt by ignoring his order to turn around the planes carrying more than 200 Venezuelan migrants bound for El Salvador. He was concerned that the paper that ICE was giving those held did not make clear they had a right to challenge their removal in court, which he believed the Supreme Court mandated.
Drew Ensign, an attorney for the Justice Department, disagreed, saying that people slated for deportation would have a “minimum” of 24 hours to challenge their removal in court. He said no flights were scheduled for Friday night and he was unaware of any Saturday, but the Department of Homeland Security said it reserved the right to remove people then.
ICE said it would not comment on the litigation.
Also Friday, a Massachusetts judge made permanent his temporary ban on the administration deporting immigrants who have exhausted their appeals to countries other than their home countries unless they are informed of their destination and given a chance to object if they’d face torture or death there.
Some Venezuelans subject to Trump’s Alien Enemies Act have been sent to El Salvador and housed in its notorious main prison.
