Judge rules migrants sent to El Salvador prison can challenge removals

UPI

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Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem receives a tour of the Terrorist Confinement Center CECOT with the Minister of Justice and Public Security Gustavo Villatoro in Tecoluca, El Salvador, on March 26. A federal judge on Wednesday ruled migrants sent to a mega-prison in mid-March must be allowed to challenge their removal under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act. Photo by Tia Dufour/U.S. Department of Homeland Security/UPI | License Photo
June 4 (UPI) -- A federal judge on Wednesday ruled at least 137 migrants sent to a mega-prison in El Salvador on flights in mid-March must be allowed to challenge their removal under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act.
District Judge James Boasberg in Washington, D.C., issued a 69-page ruling that the Department of Homeland Security had "improperly" sent migrants on flights from Texas to El Salvador's maximum security prison without giving them a chance to challenge their designation as "alien enemies."
The ruling doesn't apply to El Salvador national Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was deported to the prison from Maryland and also didn't have a hearing.
"Absent this relief, the Government could snatch anyone off the street, turn him over to a foreign country, and then effectively foreclose any corrective course of action," Boasberg wrote about the lawsuit brought by a friend of Frengel Reyes Mota, who was taken from the El Valle Detention Facility in Raymondsville, near the border with Mexico.
Boasberg, who was initially appointed by President George W. Bush, gave the federal government one week to decide to take steps to conduct hearings in denying the government's motion for an injunction.
"Defendants must facilitate Plaintiffs ability to proceed through habeas and ensure that their cases are handled as they would have been if the Government had not provided constitutionally inadequate process," he wrote.
The order didn't specifically say they must be returned to the United States.
In April, the U.S. Supreme Court also said the government must "facilitate" their return because they were denied due process. But like the district judge, the specific steps were not given. The justices didn't determine whether President Donald Trump had properly invoked the Alien Enemies Act.
"Perhaps the President lawfully invoked the Alien Enemies Act," Boasberg wrote. "Perhaps, moreover, Defendants are correct that Plaintiffs are gang members. But -- and this is the critical point -- there is simply no way to know for sure, as the CECOT Plaintiffs never had any opportunity to challenge the Government's say-so.
"Defendants instead spirited away planeloads of people before any such challenge could be made. And now, significant evidence has come to light indicating that many of those currently entombed in CECOT have no connection to the gang and thus languish in a foreign prison on flimsy, even frivolous, accusations."
ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt told CNN: "The court made clear that the Trump administration cannot decline to remedy blatant constitutional violations and leave these men in a foreign gulag, maybe incommunicado for the fear of their lives."
On March 15, Boasberg told the Trump administration to order the planes back to the United States. There were two planes carrying 238 deportees, but some of them may have had due process.
The deportees were Venezuelans accused of being members of Tren de Aragua, which Trump has named a terrorist organization to enable his administration to deport them under the provisions of the Alien Enemies Act.
"Rather than comply with the court's order, the government continued the hurried removal operation," Boasberg wrote in the 46-page filing in April. "Early on Sunday morning -- hours after the order issued -- it transferred two planeloads of passengers protected by the [temporary restraining order] into a Salvadoran mega-prison."
Attorney General Pam Bondi said the two planes already were in international airspace and outside the federal district court's jurisdiction when Boasberg ordered them to return to the United States.
Also Wednesday, the government acknowledged that a Guatemalan national in a separate case hastily deported to Mexico was returned to the United States, his legal team told CNN.