Trump deports 238 ‘gang members' to El Salvador: What's the controversy?

Al Jazeera

17-03-2025

President Donald Trump's administration deported alleged members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua from the United States to El Salvador on Sunday, despite a court order prohibiting their expulsion from the country.
The move is the latest in a series of steps by the Trump administration to expel foreign nationals — some accused of being in the US without documentation, others targeted over campus protests.
Here is what happened, and whether it violated the court order.
What happened?
El Salvador President Nayib Bukele said on Sunday that his country had received 238 members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua and an additional 23 members of the Salvadoran gang MS-13 from the US.
Bukele had agreed to jail members of these groups on behalf of the US in a meeting with Secretary of State Marco Rubio last month.
He added that these deportees were in the custody of the Central American country's Centre for the Confinement of Terrorism (CECOT) for a one-year period that could be extended.
During Trump's inauguration speech, he said he would invoke the 1798 Alien Enemies Act. On Saturday, Trump signed a proclamation invoking that 227-year-old law. The proclamation claims that Tren de Aragua is 'perpetrating, attempting, and threatening an invasion or predatory incursion' against US territory. It adds that all Venezuelan citizens aged 14 or older 'who are members of' the gang and are not naturalised or lawful permanent US citizens are liable to be restrained and removed as 'Alien Enemies'.
After Trump's order, federal judge James Boasberg, the chief judge of the District Court for the District of Columbia, issued a temporary restraining order to block Trump's ability to exercise wartime powers to carry out deportations. This was during a hearing on Saturday sought by the American Civil Liberties Union.
But hours later, Bukele confirmed that the Trump administration had nevertheless gone ahead with the deportations. He shared a snippet of a news article about the judge's ruling, captioning it: 'Oopsie … Too late', with a crying-with-laughter emoji.
What is the Alien Enemies Act and how does it work?
The Alien Enemies Act allows the US president to detain or deport non-citizens during wartime conditions. In 1798, the US was preparing for what it believed was a war with France. The law was introduced to prevent immigrants from sympathising with the French.
The law allows the president to carry out these deportations without a hearing and based only on citizenship.
The Act has been invoked only three times before, during the War of 1812, World War I and World War II.
Why is this controversial?
While Trump and his allies have argued that the US is at threat of 'invasion' of undocumented immigrants, critics say the president is wrongly invoking the wartime law.
An explainer published by the Brennan Center for Justice last year says invoking the Act 'in peacetime to bypass conventional immigration law would be a staggering abuse'.
'The courts should strike down any attempted peacetime use of the Alien Enemies Act,' it adds.
The Fifth Amendment of the US Constitution protects the right to a grand jury. 'No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury,' it states, adding that wartime is one of the few exceptions to this.
The fact that the Trump administration possibly defied a judge's order further exacerbates this controversy.
The White House's action was in 'open defiance' of Judge Boasberg's order, Patrick Eddington, a homeland security and civil liberties legal expert at the Washington, DC-based Cato Institute, told the Reuters news agency.
'This is beyond the pale and certainly unprecedented,' Eddington said.
But White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt has pushed back against the criticism.
'A single judge in a single city cannot direct the movements of an aircraft … full of foreign alien terrorists who were physically expelled from US soil,' Leavitt said in a statement posted on her X account on Sunday. She added that 'federal courts generally have no jurisdiction over the President's conduct of foreign affairs'.
Bruce Fein, an American lawyer specialising in constitutional and international law, disagreed.
'The President is not a king. January 20, 2025, was not a coronation. The President is not Napoleon … Federal courts have jurisdiction over the President,' Fein told Al Jazeera. 'The probability that Trump flouted Judge James Boasberg's order is high, but we need to await more due process,' he added.
Leavitt argued that by the time the court order was issued, the deportees had been removed from the US. The exact timings of the deportation flight are unclear.
Steve Vladeck, a professor at Georgetown University's Law Center, posted on Bluesky that 'a federal court's jurisdiction does *not* stop at the water's edge.' In other words, according to Vladeck, those deportees ought to be brought back to the US even if they had left the US airspace by the time the judge passed his order.
'The court's jurisdiction turns on the presence of the defendant in the United States, not the plaintiffs,' Fein explained, adding that Trump, the defendant in this case, is in the US. 'He could be ordered to return deportees who had been illegally deported to the United States.'
Why were these migrants sent to El Salvador?
Bukele is detaining the deportees under a deal where the US would compensate El Salvador to hold them, Bukele wrote in an X post. The Trump administration will pay approximately $6m to El Salvador for detaining about 300 alleged Tren de Aragua members from Venezuela for a year.
The Salvadorian president also shared a video on his account showing the handcuffed deportees being dragged and having their heads and faces shaved by masked El Salvador police officers.
'The United States will pay a very low fee for them, but a high one for us.'
Venezuela has typically not accepted deportees from the US. The Trump administration has sent Venezuelan deportees to third countries in Central America 'because the US does not have decent relations with Venezuela', Clive Stafford Smith, a human rights lawyer, told Al Jazeera earlier.
Over the past month, Venezuela has accepted some 350 deportees, including about 180 detained at the Guantanamo Bay US naval base in Cuba, for 16 days. As of 2022, there were 275,000 unauthorised Venezuelan immigrants in the US, according to estimates by the Pew Research Center.
What is the CECOT?
The Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, which means the Centre for the Confinement of Terrorism, is a 40,000-capacity maximum-security prison in El Salvador. That is where the alleged gang members deported by the US are now being held.
The mega-prison prohibits visitation, education and recreation. Inmates are not allowed to go outdoors.
CECOT opened in January 2023, within a year of Bukele ordering the construction. It is located in Tecoluca, 72km (45 miles) east of the Salvadorian capital, San Salvador.
What is the Tren de Aragua?
Tren de Aragua, which is Spanish for 'the train of Aragua', is designated to be a 'foreign terrorist organization' (FTO) by the US.
While information about the group is sparse, media reports have previously suggested that the group was formed in 2014 by Hector 'El Nino' Guerrero and two other men who were imprisoned in Tocoron prison in the Venezuelan state of Aragua. The gang largely controlled the prison, ordering robberies, murders and kidnappings from behind bars.
The gang is alleged to be behind the 2024 murder of former Venezuelan army officer Ronald Ojeda, who conspired against President Nicolas Maduro. In January, Maduro was sworn in for his third six-year term after a contentious election.
A proclamation published by the White House alleges that Tren de Aragua 'operates in conjunction with Cartel de los Soles, the Nicolas Maduro regime-sponsored, narco-terrorism enterprise based in Venezuela'.
What's next?
On Sunday, Trump asked the DC Circuit Court for a stay of Boasberg's order. 'The stay will assuredly be denied within days,' Fein predicted.