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Trump judges pump brakes so far on Alien Enemies Act deportations to El Salvador

Trump judges pump brakes so far on Alien Enemies Act deportations to El Salvador

CNN06-05-2025

Johnstown, Pennsylvania CNN —
The centerpiece of Donald Trump's hardline attempts to deport undocumented immigrants using a wartime power has been met with resistance by federal courts, including among judges Trump himself has appointed.
The latest, on Monday, was district Judge Stephanie Haines, presiding over a federal court in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. The administration argued to Haines that it should be able to use the Alien Enemies Act to deport migrants from the US with little advance notice.
Haines had already temporarily blocked the Trump administration from sending suspected Tren de Aragua gang members from Venezuela to El Salvador if they were held in a facility in her district, in Central Pennsylvania, where there is a hub for immigration detainees for the northeastern US.
On Monday, she didn't rule on whether he prohibition should last longer, or say if she would allow the administration to use the wartime law for detainees being moved through Pennsylvania. Yet she asked the Justice Department several questions about why they thought it was sufficient for detainees to have a fewer-than-two-day window to challenge the Alien Enemies Act once they're told they may be sent to El Salvador.
In addition to Haines, another Trump-appointed trial-level judge, in South Texas, ruled last week that removals under the Alien Enemies Act weren't lawful.
Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr., who joined the bench in Texas in 2018, decided the president alone couldn't deem the US was being threatened or invaded by Venezuelans and declare undocumented immigrants from the country alien enemies. The ruling was the first to block the administration's use of the law after weighing the case in full.
Though Rodriguez's decision only applies to migrants held in the judge's district in south Texas, it became a crucial early sign that a centerpiece of the administration's hardline immigration policy may be struck down across the country.
Each ruling, especially if they come from Trump-appointed judges, may chip away at the administration's arguments for using the controversial law.
'All these decisions are pointing in the same direction, which is that the Alien Enemies Act should only be used in time of war or invasion,' Christopher Slobogin, a criminal justice professor at Vanderbilt University Law School, told CNN this week. 'The fact that Trump appointees are saying that makes the point especially strongly.'
Two other federal judges this week — one nominated by former President Bill Clinton and another nominated by former President Joe Biden — are poised to make more thorough decisions for migrants who were detained in Colorado and the New York City area. Those judges, Alvin Hellerstein in Manhattan and Charlotte Sweeney in Denver, have already temporarily stopped immigration authorities from removing detainees whom the administration wants to deem alien enemies. A third Democratic presidential appointee to the bench, Gloria Navarro in Nevada's US District Court, has already blocked the use of the Alien Enemies Act at this time.
And three judges on the federal appeals court overseeing Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Kansas, Oklahoma and New Mexico have also declined to side with the administration so far. In a brief decision in late April, the three judges, including a George W. Bush appointee and a Trump appointee, said the Trump administration hadn't shown how they'd be irreparably harmed currently by a lower court's decision keeping detainees in Colorado inside the US.
'Given the important unresolved issues under the Alien Enemies Act (AEA) and the ruling of the United States Supreme Court that no one in that proceeding be removed under the AEA until further order of that Court, there is no realistic possibility that the government could remove any member of the class from this country' before May 6, the judges, Harris Hartz, Gregory Phillips and Joel Carson of the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, wrote. The appeal is ongoing.
Judge Wesley Hendrix, another Trump appointee in northern Texas overseeing an Alien Enemies Act case, is continuing to scrutinize the use of the law regarding detainees apprehended in other parts of the country. But the administration has agreed it won't send the detainees held in the Bluebonnet Detention Center in that district to El Salvador, as it had planned heading into Easter weekend last month, at least while their court petitions are pending.
Lee Gelernt of the ACLU, which is representing immigration detainees in the Alien Enemies Act challenges, said after a court hearing before Trump-appointed Haines in Pennsylvania the presidential appointment of the judge shouldn't matter.
'Judges, no matter who nominated them, are very serious people' and take the immigration cases seriously, Gelernt said. 'We are not going to worry about that.'
All of the Alien Enemies Act cases are building toward a possible major test at the Supreme Court, in what may be one of the most significant fights so far on Trump's power, the protections of due process, the administration's execution of Trump's immigration agenda, and federal courts' willingness to push back so far in this presidential administration.
'If you have a sufficient number of lower court cases coming to the same conclusion, that's bound to create momentum at higher-level courts,' Slobogin said. But, 'It's always possible for the Supreme Court to say, 'All you guys are wrong.''
The Supreme Court — so far, however, with three Trump appointees and conservatives controlling the majority — in an unusual 7-2 emergency vote on April 19, has put the brakes on the administration's use of the Alien Enemies Act at this time for those held in Bluebonnet.
Part of the reason why lower courts are still involved and handling these cases piecemeal across the country is because of the Supreme Court previously directing each detainee to bring their own challenge where they are held.
'These have to be brought one at a time until an upper level court decides it,' Slobogin said. 'The ACLU is going to file every suit they can file, to make sure this issue is litigated to the fullest and to publicize what's going on. I'm waiting with bated breath to see what happens.'

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Analysis: Trump's top general just undercut his ‘invasion' claims
Analysis: Trump's top general just undercut his ‘invasion' claims

CNN

time11 minutes ago

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Analysis: Trump's top general just undercut his ‘invasion' claims

One of the problems with making a series of brazen and hyperbolic claims is that it can be hard to keep everyone on your team on the same page. And few Trump administration claims have been as brazen as the idea that the Venezuelan government has engineered an invasion of gang members into the United States. This claim forms the basis of the administration's controversial efforts to rapidly deport a bunch of people it claimed were members of the gang Tren de Aragua – without due process. But one of the central figures responsible for warding off such invasions apparently didn't get the memo. At a Senate hearing Wednesday, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman retired Lt. Gen. Dan Caine acknowledged that the United States isn't currently facing such a threat. 'I think at this point in time, I don't see any foreign state-sponsored folks invading,' Caine said in response to Democratic questioning. This might sound like common sense; of course the United States isn't currently under invasion by a foreign government. You'd probably have heard something about that on the news. But the administration has said – repeatedly and in court – that it has been. When Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act to rapidly deport migrants without due process, that law required such a foreign 'invasion' or 'predatory incursion' to make his move legal. And Trump said that's what was happening. 'The result is a hybrid criminal state that is perpetrating an invasion of and predatory incursion into the United States, and which poses a substantial danger to the United States,' reads the proclamation from Trump. It added that Tren de Aragua's actions came 'both directly and at the direction, clandestine or otherwise, of the Maduro regime in Venezuela.' So the White House said Tren de Aragua was acting in concert with the Maduro regime to invade; Caine now says 'state-sponsored folks' aren't invading. Some flagged Caine's comment as undermining Trump's claims of a foreign 'invasion' in Los Angeles. Trump has regularly applied that word to undocumented migrants. But the inconsistency is arguably more significant when it comes to Trump's claims about the Venezuelan migrants. Perhaps the administration would argue that Trump has halted the invasion and it is no longer happening; Caine was speaking in the present tense. Caine did go on to cite others who might have different views. 'But I'll be mindful of the fact that there has been some border issues throughout time, and defer to DHS who handles the border along the nation's contiguous outline,' he said. But if an invasion had been happening recently, it seems weird not to mention that. And if the invasion is over, that would seem to undercut the need to keep trying to use the Alien Enemies Act. The Department of Homeland Security is certainly not in the camp of no invasion. On Wednesday, DHS posted on Facebook an image with Uncle Sam that reads: 'Report all foreign invaders' with a phone number for ICE. When asked about the image and whether the use of the term 'foreign invaders' had been used previously, DHS pointed CNN to a number of posts from White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller using terms like 'invade' or 'invaders' when referring to undocumented immigrants. Plenty of Trump administration figures have gone to bat for this claim. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said soon after Trump's proclamation that Tren de Aragua gang members 'have been sent here by the hostile Maduro regime in Venezuela.' Then-national security adviser Michael Waltz claimed Maduro was emptying his prisons 'in a proxy manner to influence and attack the United States.' We soon learned that the intelligence community had concluded Venezuela had not directed the gang. But Secretary of State Marco Rubio stood by Trump's claim. 'Yes, that's their assessment,' Rubio said last month about the intelligence community. 'They're wrong.' Trump administration border czar Tom Homan has said the gang was an 'arm of the Maduro regime,' and that Maduro's regime was 'involved with sending thousands of Venezuelans to this country to unsettle it.' The question of Venezuela's purported involvement actually hasn't been dealt with much by the courts. A series of judges have moved to block the administration's Alien Enemies Act gambit, but they've generally ruled that way because of the lack of an 'invasion' or 'predatory incursion' – without delving much into the more complex issue of whether such a thing might somehow have ties to Maduro's government. One of the judges to rule in that fashion was a Trump appointee, US District Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr. So the intelligence community and a bunch of judges – including a Trump-appointed one – have rebutted the claim the underlies this historic effort to set aside due process. And now, the man Trump installed as his top general seems to have undercut it too.

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