Trump’s Migrant Deportations: Judge Says Nazis in US in WWII Had More Rights to Contest Their Removal Than Venezuelan Migrants Now
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Last Wednesday (March 26), Judge Patricia Millett, a judge in the appeals court in Washington D.C., delivered a stinging rebuke to the Trump administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport 238 Venezuelan migrants — allegedly members of the Tren de Aragua gang — to CECOT, El Salvador’s notorious maximum-security “terrorist” prison, where they are all now imprisoned without charge or trial, for at least a year, and perhaps more, at a cost to the US taxpayer of $6 million, even though no evidence was presented by the Trump administration to confirm that they were gang members, and even though, in some cases, compelling testimony from family members would seem to confirm that they had no involvement whatsoever with Tren de Aragua.
At the hearing on March 26, Judge Millett told the government’s main lawyer, Drew Ensign, a Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Justice Department, that “Nazis got better treatment under the Alien Enemies Act than has happened here”, in an exchange relating to whether or not, as the Guardian described it, “Venezuelans targeted for removal under the Alien Enemies Act had time to contest the Trump administration’s assertion that they were members of the Tren de Aragua gang before they were put on planes and deported to El Salvador.”
Trump’s disturbing invocation of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798
Donald Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act in a “proclamation” on March 15, in what appeared to be a nakedly authoritarian attempt to deport Venezuelans alleged to be members of the gang without making any effort to establish whether or not that was the case.
Horror As Trump Invokes the Alien Enemies Act, Defies a Judge and Sends Innocent Venezuelans to El Salvador’s “Mega-Prison”
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Since Donald Trump launched a cynical, cruel and racist “war on migrants” when he took office two months ago, he has sought to use the existing “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay to hold migrants described as “high-priority criminal aliens unlawfully present in the United States.” Most of these men — over 300 in total, just 1% of the 30,000 Trump pledged to imprison when he first announced his Guantánamo plans on January 29 — have been Venezuelans, although no evidence has been provided that any of them were the “high-priority criminal aliens” that Trump alleged, with copious amounts of evidence subsequently emerging to demonstrate that their purported involvement with a notorious Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua, was based solely on their tattoos.
Trump’s rationale for using Guantánamo has also been unclear. It appears, primarily, to have been an expensive act of “performative cruelty”, given how expensive it is to use Guantánamo, especially when all of the men detained could have been deported from the existing ICE facilities on the US mainland where they were previously held, a notion reinforced by the fact that most of the men were subsequently deported, while others were ignominiously returned to ICE facilities on US soil.
In an article for the Close Guantánamo website, I have just provided a detailed review of Trump’s Guantánamo migrant policy, but in this follow-up article I examine an even more disturbing development, involving Trump bypassing Guantánamo, and inappropriately invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport Venezuelan migrants from the US mainland, flagrantly ignoring a temporary restraining order issued by a federal court judge preventing the use of the Act to deport migrants, and immediately sending 238 Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador, along with 23 alleged Salvadorian gang members, to be imprisoned in the notorious CECOT “mega-prison”, established by El Salvador’s hardline President Nayib Bukele — again, without any evidence having been provided to back up the administration’s assertions regarding these men’s gang membership.
Who's still at Guantánamo?
