By Rachel Uranga | and Andrea Castillo | Para netogaia.com.br
Published April 18, 2025 Updated April 19, 2025 7:19 AM PE.
The U.S. Supreme Court temporarily blocked the removal of Venezuelan detainees accused under a wartime law of being foreign gang members early Saturday morning, after the ACLU argued the men were at risk of imminent removal to an El Salvadoran prison.
“The Government is directed not to remove any member of the putative class of detainees from the United States until further order of this Court,” the court stated in an unsigned order.
Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented.
The court’s after-midnight intervention heightens its clash with the Trump administration over deportations. It suggests most of the justices are not willing to trust Trump officials to follow its earlier order giving detainees a right to a hearing before they can be deported.
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The ACLU had asked multiple courts on Friday to temporarily halt the detainees’ removal — arguing in one filing that the Trump administration was busing many of them presumably to an airport to be deported.
In a Friday hearing, Drew C. Ensign, a lawyer for the U.S. Department of Justice, told U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg in Washington, D.C., that there were no current plans to deport individuals Friday or Saturday by plane presumably to El Salvador, but the Trump administration reserved the right to remove people on Saturday.
The ACLU asked the courts for an emergency order after Venezuelan detainees from across the country, including California, were transferred to the Bluebonnet Detention Facility in Anson, Texas, and, according to their filings, told they will be removed as soon as Friday night.
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The Trump administration flew hundreds of Venezuelan immigrants deemed members of Tren de Aragua last month to El Salvador, where they are being held in a notorious mega-prison called the Terrorism Confinement Center. Families of many of the men sent to El Salvador on the earlier planes say they are not gang members.
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The deportations kicked off a high-stakes legal battle testing the limits of President Trump’s deportation plans and his power.
The Supreme Court ruled earlier this month that the wartime authority invoked by the administration could resume, but immigrants must be given proper notice and a chance to make their case in places where they were being detained.
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Boasberg, who had heard the earlier case about the administration’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act, had ordered a temporary halt to removals. But despite the order, deportation planes were sent to El Salvador, where more than 200 people remain in prison.
The Trump administration has said that once individuals are outside of U.S. jurisdiction, there is little they can do to bring them back to the United States.
Last week, Trump and his top advisors met in the Oval Office with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele and were almost gleeful in saying that nothing could be done to return any of those prisoners once they had left this country.
The court had said the administration had a duty to “facilitate” the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was deported in error to El Salvador.
“If these people are removed to a foreign prison, perhaps for the rest of their lives, without any due process, it would be in clear violation of the Supreme Court’s opinion,” Lee Gelerent, ACLU attorney leading the case, told The Times Friday.
The case began in a Texas federal court earlier in the week, when the ACLU asked Judge Wesley Hendrix to temporarily stop any removal on behalf of two individuals because they didn’t have a chance to challenge their cases.
Trump asks Supreme Court for permission to resume deporting Venezuelan migrants under wartime law
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Hendrix denied the request. By Friday, lawyers learned of more individuals being held and asked again, after reports circulated that removals were imminent. When lawyers didn’t get a response that afternoon, they sought help from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th District and asked the Supreme Court to step in.
Alito is the circuit justice for the 5th Circuit, which means that emergency appeals go to him first if they come from Texas, Louisiana or Mississippi. But apparently, he was not willing to move quickly to block further deportations.
That means Chief Justice John G. Roberts and six other justices put together the order without Alito or Thomas.
Fonte: Lons Angeles Times.