The Trump administration has transferred hundreds of immigrants to El Salvador even as a federal judge issued an order temporarily barring the deportations under an 18th century wartime declaration targeting Venezuelan gang members.

The Trump administration said the president actually signed the proclamation contending Tren de Aragua was invading the United States Friday night but didn’t announce it until Saturday afternoon. Immigration lawyers said that, late Friday, they noticed Venezuelans who otherwise couldn’t be deported under immigration law being moved to Texas for deportation flights. They began to file lawsuits to halt the transfers.

“Basically any Venezuelan citizen in the US may be removed on pretext of belonging to Tren de Aragua, with no chance at defense,” Adam Isacson of the Washington Office for Latin America, a human rights group, warned on X.

  • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.worldEnglish
    28·
    13 hours ago

    From the article …

    U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg issued an order Saturday blocking the deportations but lawyers told him there were already two planes with immigrants in the air — one headed for El Salvador, the other for Honduras. Boasberg verbally ordered the planes be turned around, but they apparently were not and he did not include the directive in his written order.

    Steve Vladeck, a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, said that Boasberg’s verbal directive to turn around the planes was not technically part of his final order but that the Trump administration clearly violated the “spirit” of it.

    “This just incentivizes future courts to be hyper specific in their orders and not give the government any wiggle room,” Vladeck said.

    Honestly, not surprising.

    They’re bending the system as far as they can, and sometimes even breaking it, if they can get away with it.

    If you give them an out, they’ll take it.

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