Migrants sent to Salvadoran prison need chance to challenge removals, judge rules
The first Venezuelan migrants deported to El Salvador under a rarely invoked wartime law must be given the opportunity to challenge their removals even if they remain outside the United States, a federal judge ruled Wednesday.
U.S. District Court Chief Judge James E. Boasberg said those 137 migrants - whom the government accused of being members of the violent Tren de Aragua gang - were “plainly deprived” of their right to contest their removals before they were flown to a notorious Salvadoran prison under the Alien Enemies Act in March. He gave the Trump administration until June 11 to submit proposals on how it intends to allow the detainees, who remain in El Salvador, to file those legal challenges.
“Mindful of national-security and foreign-policy concerns, the Court will not - at least yet - order the Government to take any specific steps. It will instead allow Defendants to submit proposals regarding the appropriate actions,” Boasberg wrote in his ruling.
“Absent this relief,” the judge added, “the government could snatch anyone off the street, turn him over to a foreign country and then effectively foreclose any corrective course of action.”
Judges across the country have taken issue with how the Trump administration has deployed the Alien Enemies Act to deport accused gang members - including many whose families dispute that they were in gangs and who do not have criminal records in the United States.
Federal courts in parts of Texas, New York, California, Colorado and Pennsylvania have temporarily halted deportations under the law in their jurisdictions, saying the 24 hours’ notice the government has proposed giving to detainees does not allow them enough opportunity to file legal challenges before their removals.
The Supreme Court has ordered that Alien Enemies Act detainees be given adequate time to “actually seek” relief in court but has yet to rule on whether Trump’s use of the law to deport foreign gang members is legal.
The deportees at the heart of Boasberg’s ruling Wednesday received next-to-zero notice and were deported before those other rulings were issued. They were passengers on the first flights the Trump administration sent to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) on March 15 - planes that Boasberg had ordered to turn around.
The flights landed in El Salvador anyway, and Boasberg has since initiated contempt proceedings to determine whether administration officials willfully disobeyed his order.
On Wednesday, Boasberg concluded the government had “plainly deprived” the immigrants of the opportunity to contest their removals and noted “significant evidence” has surfaced since their deportations to suggest that many of the migrants were not tied to Tren de Aragua “and thus languish in a foreign prison on flimsy, even frivolous, accusations.”
He ordered the administration to “ensure that their cases are handled as they would have been if the government had not provided [a] constitutionally inadequate process.”
Still, the judge acknowledged that providing hearings to CECOT detainees could prove difficult.
He said he could only take Trump administration officials at their word that under the terms of the United States’ agreement with El Salvador, the deportees could not be brought back for legal proceedings and are no longer in the legal custody of the United States. (In a remarkable passage, the judge noted he had trouble accepting those claims as fact “given the government’s troubling conduct throughout this case.”)
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the ruling, which it can appeal.
Lee Gelernt, the lead ACLU attorney representing the deportees, welcomed the decision.
“The court,” he said in a statement, “rightly held that the Trump administration must remedy its blatant constitutional violations and cannot simply leave these individuals in a foreign gulag-type prison, perhaps incommunicado for the remainder of their lives.”