The Supreme Court on Monday handed US President Donald Trump a victory by lifting a lower court order barring the deportation of undocumented Venezuelan migrants using an obscure wartime law, but the nation’s top court also said that migrants subject to deportation under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act (AEA) must be given an opportunity to legally challenge their removal.
The 5-4 decision by the Supreme Court would allow the Trump administration to resume deportations that had been blocked by a federal district court judge.
Trump invoked the AEA, which has only previously been used during wartime, to round up alleged Venezuelan gang members and summarily deport them to a notorious maximum security prison in El Salvador.
Photo: AP
Attorneys for several of the deported Venezuelans have said that their clients were not members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, had committed no crimes and were targeted largely on the basis of their tattoos.
District Judge James Boasberg issued temporary restraining orders barring further flights of deportees under the AEA after planes full of Venezuelan migrants were sent to El Salvador on March 15.
The Supreme Court lifted Boasberg’s orders, but mostly on technical grounds related to venue — the group of Venezuelan migrants who sued to prevent their removal are in Texas while the case before Boasberg was brought in Washington.
“The detainees are confined in Texas, so venue is improper in the District of Columbia,” the justices said, leaving the door open to possible further challenges to the legality of using the AEA to be heard in lower courts.
At the same time, the Supreme Court made it clear that migrants subject to deportation under the AEA, which has only been used during the War of 1812, World War I and World War II, are entitled to some form of due process.
“AEA detainees must receive notice after the date of this order that they are subject to removal under the Act,” the court said.
“Detainees subject to removal orders under the AEA are entitled to notice and an opportunity to challenge their removal. The only question is which court will resolve that challenge,” the court added.
Lee Gelernt, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed suit against the deportations, said the Supreme Court’s ruling that deportees were entitled to due process was an “important victory.”
Chief Justice John Roberts and four other conservative justices voted to lift the district court order’s temporarily barring the deportations using the AEA while, three liberal justices and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a Trump appointee, dissented.
“The President of the United States has invoked a centuries-old wartime statute to whisk people away to a notoriously brutal, foreign-run prison,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said.
“For lovers of liberty, this should be quite concerning,” she said.
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