Alien Enemies Act Deportations Were Carefully Orchestrated To Keep Courts In The Dark

They didn’t know where they were going.

Some called their families in tears. Others sent confusing messages to their attorneys, saying that ICE agents had told them that they were headed back home — to Venezuela. 

But only hours later, the Trump administration would deport these detainees to El Salvador.  It capped what TPM has identified as a multi-week effort to prepare for the removals while concealing its plans for as long as possible. The administration carefully orchestrated the removals so as it make it nearly impossible for attorneys to notice and sue, and for courts to intervene to slow down or halt the deportations. Once it became clear that Trump was invoking the Alien Enemies Act to remove more than one hundred Venezuelans without due process, the deportations were already underway: detainees had been prepositioned to depart, with many lawyers unaware or unable to contact their clients. Deportees were over the Gulf of Mexico by the time the court issued its order to freeze deportations, on their way to an El Salvadorian work camp. 

For this story, I spoke with several attorneys for those who were deported on March 15. I trawled through court filings and listened to judges and attorneys pick over the legal wreckage left by the removals. What emerged was a clear and deeply alarming picture: The Trump administration commenced orchestrating the removals long before Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act, and did so in a way that seems to have been designed to evade judicial oversight.

The judge who ordered a halt to the removals remarked on the issue at a hearing last week, observing that ICE had to have had “advance notice of this proclamation because it’s impossible that this could have happened in a few hours.”

In this story, basic principles of American immigration law did not apply. Not only did the government deprive those removed of their right to a hearing before an impartial judge, TPM’s reporting shows that federal officials went to extraordinary lengths to conceal weeks of preparations for the removals. 

ICE officers began arresting Venezuelan men with tattoos in early February. Over the next month and a half, detainees were progressively moved across the country towards the South Texas airfield from which the removal flights departed. All of the cases that TPM reviewed involved asylum seekers with unresolved claims. On March 14, the night before they were sent to El Salvador, some detainees were told they were being sent to Venezuela. Families and attorneys were never notified of the actual removals — which were not to Venezuela, but to an El Salvadorian prison known for mass torture. Trump himself signed the Alien Enemies Act proclamation in secret. 

The effect was to keep the detainees’ whereabouts and final destination unclear even to their close relatives and overburdened lawyers. Attorneys with the ACLU only managed to file a class-action lawsuit over the Alien Enemies Act invocation in the middle of the night. By the time a judge was able to order a halt — around 80 minutes after the first takeoff — airplanes were already over the Gulf of Mexico on their way to El Salvador.

At least two judges who have handled the case have remarked on this. Judge James Boasberg, the chief D.C. judge and ex-Alien Terrorist Removal Court chief, wrote in a Monday order that the speed with which the Trump administration rushed people onto planes “implied a desire to circumvent judicial review.” Later on Monday, D.C. Circuit judge Patricia Millett observed that “people weren’t given notice, they weren’t told where they were going.” 

TPM’s reporting reveals in detail the facts that gave rise to these impressions. 

“They knew that what they were doing was wrong,” John Dutton, an attorney for one removed Venezuelan, told TPM. “The way they did it, how they did it, in the middle of the night, how they didn’t allow them to tell their families. They didn’t tell them. They didn’t tell us as attorneys.”

You can think of the planning for this fait accompli as having unfolded in three stages. In Stage I, ICE officers began to detain Venezuelans, citing their tattoos and invoking Trump’s Jan. 20 executive order designating Tren de Aragua as a terrorist organization. This was the detention phase, and, according to interviews and records that TPM reviewed, it began at least six weeks before the removals themselves took place. 

In Stage II, ICE laid further groundwork for the removals. Venezuelans from across the country, many of whom were still in immigration court proceedings, were transferred from their initial place of detention to South Texas. In one case, a soon-to-be deported Venezuelan had an immigration court hearing scheduled the week before his removal in Elizabeth, NJ. Instead, he missed the hearing because the government had placed him in a detention facility in South Texas.

By the time of Stage III — the March 15 removals — all of the detainees that TPM identified were located in facilities near the airfield where the deportations took place. Administration officials shielded the removals themselves from oversight: attorneys and family members were never notified that their client or relative was about to be sent to El Salvador. 

“It’s not Guantanamo where they can be taken back, since they’re still under U.S. custody,” Dutton added. “They knew exactly what they were doing and they knew how wrong it was, and they did it anyway. And that’s just so scary, so heartbreaking.” 

David Leopold, another immigration attorney and former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told TPM that the operation would have “taken weeks to plan.” 

“You’ve got to get the planes ready. You obviously have to coordinate with El Salvador. You have to make sure that they had room in their prison and that sort of thing,” Leopold said. “They clearly had a press event down there to make it into a reality TV show. So that had to be pre-organized and probably organized quietly. Otherwise people would know. They had to decide who was going to be on the plane.”

ICE referred TPM to DHS for comment. DHS did not return a request for comment; neither did the White House. 

Setting the stage

Mentions of invoking the Alien Enemies Act first appeared sporadically during Trump’s first term. But they began to form the centerpiece of a broader attack on civil liberties, done in the name of immigration enforcement, around 2023.

Axios published a story in August of that year saying that Trump would invoke the law if elected. The story described the statute, which had only been invoked during the War of 1812, World War I, and World War II, as “often-overlooked.” The Trump team saw the act as a way to leapfrog the immigration courts, potentially overcoming a backlog generated by the need for due process and other basic features of the American justice system. 

But applying the law to Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang that is neither a government nor engaged in an invasion of the United States, would require groundwork. On Jan. 20, Trump took the first step in that direction: he issued an executive order designating TdA as a terrorist organization. Trump promised in his inauguration speech to invoke the act, saying he would direct the “full and immense power” of federal and state law enforcement against unspecified “foreign gangs and criminal networks.” 

But the administration had a problem. If the act was to be invoked, there would surely be a legal challenge. And yet, without judicial oversight, the act could plausibly be in effect for long enough to allow for removals before the plodding court system kicked into action. How could the government assemble enough people that might plausibly be subject to a future Alien Enemies Act proclamation (though some were not) without tipping off anyone who might sue to block the effort? 

TPM’s reporting suggests that ICE began to prepare for deportations under the Alien Enemies Act within days. 

In the first week of February, ICE began to detain Venezuelan asylum seekers. These were people who were already in the then-standard system for seeking asylum, and were abiding by the rules to remain in the United States, which included regular check-ins with federal authorities. In several cases, ICE detained these people at their check-ins on the basis of their having a tattoo. 

ICE agents singled out one Venezuelan asylum seeker, Franco José Caraballo Tiapa, for detention on Feb. 3 because he had tattoos, according to documents that TPM reviewed and a conversation with his attorney. They asked him at an interview in Dallas whether he was a member of TdA. 

Authorities swept up others in February. Per one affidavit, a Venezuelan man in New York City was arrested by ICE personnel at his USCIS interview on Feb. 28 and asked about TdA.

From there, no further due process or examination to determine whether these people were actually TdA members appears to have taken place. They would preemptively be treated as subject to an Alien Enemies Act invocation that had not yet happened – another unreviewable and, as would come to be seen, irreversible decision. Without proactively notifying their attorneys, ICE began to move people towards South Texas. 

The dates here are fuzzy in part because of the concealment. The attorneys themselves can only approximate when their clients were moved to South Texas, and have had to rely on a sometimes-faulty online ICE locator to do so. Many of the attorneys here represent dozens of immigration clients, reducing the time they have to track the particularities of each case. Trump policies have also injected a general level of tumult into the immigration system, with many people being moved across the country with no notice. 

Martin Rosenow, Caraballo Tiapa’s attorney, told TPM that his client was moved to the Rio Grande Processing Center, northwest of Harlingen, Texas, on March 5. Another attorney, who requested anonymity due to fear of reprisals, told TPM that his client was moved from a holding facility in Jena, Louisiana to El Valle Detention Center, 20 miles north of Harlingen, one week before the removals. Per one affidavit, a deportee was moved to Texas from California on March 10 or 11 without notice. Another affidavit recounted the story of a man who had been in detention since Jan. 28 in Pennsylvania, before being moved to El Valle Detention Center between March 7 and March 9.

Another attorney, who requested anonymity due to lack of authorization from their firm to speak to the press, said that some Venezuelans who had sought asylum and were moved to South Texas for Alien Enemies Act removal were forced to miss hearings scheduled in the north, because the government was holding them in El Valle. 

The result, in any case, was the same: a fait accompli. Lawyers began to lose track of where their clients were. The pattern of everyone being sent towards South Texas only became evident in retrospect: after the planes had departed, and their clients were on their way to an El Salvadorian prison camp. 

Point of no return

The final day before removal involved a series of confusing, but increasingly alarming communications, multiple attorneys told TPM. 

The night before their final removal to El Salvador, some Venezuelans were put on a plane and told that they were going to be sent back to their home country. 

Rosenow, the attorney, told TPM that his client called his wife sobbing that night while seated on an airplane, saying that they were being sent to Venezuela. 

When the client’s wife called, Rosenow said that he couldn’t believe it. 

“For me, it was impossible, because he still had an open asylum pending and you can’t be deported without being given due process. So at first I told her, ‘you know what? I think he’s just being transferred to another facility because his case is still ongoing,’” Rosenow recalled. “It’s impossible that he’d be deported.” 

It had the effect of confusing Rosenow and the family. It’s not clear what happened to the plane; Rosenow would not depart until the next day. 

The next day, the final removals to El Salvador began. 

Rumors about people being removed from the United States without a judicial deportation order had begun to spread. CNN reported that Trump was set to invoke the Alien Enemies Act. Lee Gelernt, an ACLU attorney, told a federal circuit court this week that he filed suit to block the removals at 2 a.m. ET on March 15. 

“The Proclamation is expected to authorize ‘immediate’ removal of noncitizens that the Proclamation deems to be alien enemies, without any opportunity for judicial review,” the ACLU complaint, filed without the group having seen the proclamation, read. 

It’s not clear exactly when Trump signed the Alien Enemies Act proclamation. The proclamation stated that it was signed on March 14; an ICE officer testified that it was first posted on the White House website at 3:53 p.m. ET on March 15. 

At 5:26 p.m. and 5:44 p.m., Texas time, the first two flights departed Harlingen, according to online flight trackers. 

One hour later, Judge Boasberg ordered that the planes be turned around. They were not. It was a done deal: the planes landed in El Salvador, sending more than a hundred people to a prison famed for its human rights violations. 

Back to court

For the past week, Judge Boasberg has been trying to sort through the detritus. 

He was presented with a series of facts that he could not alter, even with the power of verbal and written court orders on March 15. An unknown number of Venezuelan men had been removed — potentially irreversibly — to an El Salvador prison camp touted by a millennial strongman influencer. 

Boasberg has scrambled for the past 10 days to get to the bottom of what happened. The Trump administration has appeared to evade his basic, fact-finding questions, and on Monday invoked the rarely used states secret privilege, which could further obscure what happened. Boasberg’s efforts have included simple inquiries aimed at having the government confirm publicly available information, like when the planes took off. The judge has also asked the Trump administration to explain why not putting the Venezuelans on the planes in El Salvador and returning them to the United States did not violate his orders. 

Trump administration attorneys have argued, both to Boasberg and at an appellate hearing this week, that habeas corpus claims are the only way that people affected by the Alien Enemies Act proclamation can contest their detention or deportation.

But as Dutton, the attorney, pointed out, that’s difficult to do when you don’t know where your client is, and even harder if he is no longer in federal custody. 

“How the hell do they get him back?” Dutton asked. “He’s not in the U.S. government’s possession anymore.”

The removals left many of the lawyers involved at a total loss.

Dutton pushed to attend a bond hearing in his client’s case the week after the client was deported. When Dutton asked where his client was, an attorney for the government said that he did not know. The immigration judge suggested that Dutton reach out to the El Salvadorian consulate. 

The client’s family later recognized their relative in photos taken in El Salvador.

Another lawyer told TPM that he tried calling and emailing the detention center, and was only told that his client was “no longer here.” He left 17 additional calls with ICE, but hasn’t heard back. 

Rosenow, Caraballo’s attorney, told TPM that he was stunned. He had contacted El Salvador’s prison authority, not known for its close tracking of inmates. In an act of desperation, Rosenow contacted the UN Human Rights Office’s High Commissioner to report his client’s disappearance. 

TPM reviewed the message. 

Under a category for “State and State-Supported Forces Considered Responsible,” Rosenow listed: “The United States, United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement, United States Department of Homeland Security.”