Migrants flown to El Salvador under Alien Enemies Act must be allowed to challenge their removal, federal judge rules
A group of migrants the Trump administration sent to a mega-prison in El Salvador earlier this year must now have an opportunity to challenge their removal under the Alien Enemies Act, a federal judge ruled Wednesday.
The ruling from US District Judge James Boasberg said that US officials had 'improperly' loaded the migrants on to flights in mid-March and sent them to El Salvador's CECOT prison without giving them a chance to challenge their designation as 'alien enemies' subject to President Donald Trump's use of the sweeping 18th century wartime law.
As a result, Boasberg wrote, officials must find a way to 'facilitate' the migrants' '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.'
Earlier this year the Supreme Court, without deciding whether Trump had properly invoked the Alien Enemies Act, said officials must give migrants targeted under it a chance to contest their removal through so-called habeas petitions.
'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.
Several hundred Venezuelan migrants were sent to CECOT in mid-March after Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act.
'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,' said ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt.
Boasberg, the chief judge of the trial-level federal court in Washington, DC, was critical in his ruling of the administration's actions earlier this year, particularly given the fact that information that emerged after the flights occurred undermined the government's claims that the migrants were members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.
'Perhaps the President lawfully invoked the Alien Enemies Act. 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,' the judge wrote.
He continued: '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.'
This story has been updated with additional developments.
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