Despite the reams of documents, hours of hearings and the unlawful expulsion of Venezuelan detainees, no judge had ruled on whether the Trump administration can even apply the Alien Enemies Act to these alleged gang members — until Thursday.
U.S. District Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr., a Trump appointee in the Southern District of Texas, ruled that the administration’s contortion of the law — meant to spring to life when a “foreign nation or government” is carrying out an “invasion or predatory incursion” into the United States — went far beyond its scope. The Trump administration has argued that the Venezuelan government, through alleged members of the gang Tren de Aragua, is “invading” the United States.
“The historical record renders clear that the President’s invocation of the AEA through the Proclamation exceeds the scope of the statute and is contrary to the plain, ordinary meaning of the statute’s terms,” Rodriguez wrote. “As a result, the Court concludes that as a matter of law, the Executive Branch cannot rely on the AEA, based on the Proclamation, to detain the Named Petitioners and the certified class, or to remove them from the country.”
The AEA had only previously been invoked three times: during the War of 1812 and the two World Wars. Due to the administration’s attempt to expel the detainees quickly and quietly — the better to avoid judicial scrutiny — the litigation thus far has largely played out in an emergency posture, centering on attempts to block the expulsions rather than question at the heart of the gambit.
The case in which Rodriguez ruled Thursday splintered off from an earlier, emergency suit that the ACLU brought in the early hours of March 15 as the Trump administration prepared to use the 18th-century, wartime power to send more than 100 Venezuelans to a detention camp in El Salvador.
Trump had secretly signed a proclamation invoking the act, which didn’t enter into legal force until it became public during the afternoon of the 15th. Hours later, with ICE having prepositioned Venezuelans for rendition to El Salvador, three planes took off from Texas even as a federal D.C. judge rushed to block the operation from taking place.
The Supreme Court later ruled that all future AEA challenges had to be filed as habeas corpus claims. That ruling nullified the ACLU’s D.C. suit, leading it to file a habeas corpus class action lawsuit in the Southern District of Texas on behalf of some of the original Venezuelans whose removal the earlier case successfully blocked.
On Thursday, Rodriguez dismissed the administration’s argument that courts can’t touch a president’s power to invoke the AEA.
“Construing the language of the AEA does not require courts to adjudicate the wisdom of the President’s foreign policy and national security decisions,” he wrote.
He also agreed with the lawyers for the detainees that even if the detainees were gang members — which many of them deny — their presence does not justify the use of the law.
“As for the activities of the Venezuelan-directed TdA in the United States, and as described in the Proclamation, the Court concludes that they do not fall within the plain, ordinary meaning of ‘invasion’ or ‘predatory incursion’ for purposes of the AEA,” he wrote.
It’s one of several lawsuits filed in judicial districts across the country seeking to block the administration from invoking the law to remove more Venezuelans to CECOT. In one case last month, the Trump administration allegedly moved people out of the Southern District of Texas, where an earlier preliminary injunction barred removal, to the Northern District of Texas, as part of a plan to carry out more AEA removals. The Supreme Court issued a rare, middle-of-the-night intervention that was lightning-fast by its usual standards to block that from happening.
That ruling blocked further removals without getting to the core of whether Trump had the authority to use the law to send people to El Salvador.
Read the ruling here:
Bravo! Is this jurist now a deranged, leftist judge, deserving of impeachment, but who was appointed by Trump?
The cognitive dissonance will make heads explode.
Let’s see if the order is obeyed.
Bullshit Barbie Spin: “Obviously, a communist sympathetic democratic advocate judge who hates the president.”
There! Was that so hard?
It’s about time somebody finally read the damn Alien Enemies Act. Geesh.
But how in the world was Don John tricked into appointing a judge that actually looks at the law – even when a Repub is being accused of abusing it? How could Leonard L make such a bad call? Heads need to roll somewhere.
“Judge Slow-Poke Rodriguez is a nasty, radical left Democrat that I’ve never heard of before today”
Donald J. Trump, Super Genius