Washington — The Trump administration on Friday asked the Supreme Court to lift lower court orders blocking deportations of alleged Venezuelan gang members under the wartime Alien Enemies Act.
The Justice Department made the request for emergency relief just days after a federal appeals court in Washington declined to let the administration resume the deportations of people believed to be members of the Tren de Aragua gang to El Salvador under the wartime authority.
“This case presents fundamental questions about who decides how to conduct sensitive national-security-related operations in this country — the President, through Article II, or the Judiciary, through [temporary restraining orders],” acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris wrote. “The Constitution supplies a clear answer: the President. The republic cannot afford a different choice.”
The Supreme Court has asked lawyers for a group of five Venezuelan nationals who challenged the administration’s efforts to invoke the Alien Enemies Act to respond to the Justice Department’s request by April 1.
The dispute over President Trump’s effort to use the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelan migrants believed to be members of the gang Tren de Aragua has played out amid a host of lawsuits challenging many aspects of his second-term agenda. The request for emergency relief from the Supreme Court is now the sixth made by the Justice Department. Three others are still awaiting action by the justices.
As with the others, the latest bid for intervention by the high court attacks the scope of the order issued by the district judge presiding over the case, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg. But the criticisms of Boasberg by the president and his allies escalated the administration’s ongoing tension with the courts. Mr. Trump called for the judge to be impeached after he issued an order that blocked the administration earlier this month from using the Alien Enemies Act to summarily deport migrants, prompting a rare rebuke from Chief Justice John Roberts.
“[T]he district court’s orders have rebuffed the president’s judgments as to how to protect the nation against foreign terrorist organizations and risk debilitating effects for delicate foreign negotiations,” Harris wrote in her filing with the Supreme Court. “More broadly, rule-by-TRO has become so commonplace among district courts that the Executive Branch’s basic functions are in peril.”
The legal battle began earlier this month when the president invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to order the deportation of Venezuelan migrants suspected of being members of Tren de Aragua prison gang. Mr. Trump claimed in his proclamation that the gang was “perpetrating, attempting, and threatening an invasion or predatory incursion against the territory of the United States,” the legal threshold for using the authority, which has only been invoked three times before, and all during times of war.
The president declared that all members of the gang who are in the U.S. unlawfully were “subject to immediate apprehension, detention and removal.”
Five Venezuelan nationals who are being held at an immigration detention center in Texas filed a lawsuit in Washington, D.C., on March 15 that sought to stop the administration from removing them under the Alien Enemies Act.
Boasberg agreed to block the removals of the five Venezuelans for 14 days. Several hours later, the judge expanded his order to prevent the Trump administration from deporting any migrants believed to be members of Tren de Aragua under the Alien Enemies Act.
The judge had also told the Justice Department in person during a hearing that any planes carrying people subject to Mr. Trump’s proclamation that were going to take off or were already in the air needed to return to the U.S. Planes carrying migrants later landed in El Salvador, raising questions about whether the government complied with Boasberg’s order.
The Justice Department has argued that it was not bound by the oral directive, though the district court has continued to examine whether the government complied with his order.
The Trump administration appealed the court’s two-week ban on deportations under the Alien Enemies Act to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, which issued a 2-1 decision Wednesday that declined to allow the administration to resume the deportations.
In the filing with the Supreme Court, Harris argued that the Alien Enemies Act gives the president sweeping national-security authority, and she warned that the district court’s orders are harming the administration’s ability to conduct foreign policy.
“That order is forcing the United States to harbor individuals whom national-security officials have identified as members of a foreign terrorist organization bent upon grievously harming Americans,” she argued. “Those orders —which are likely to extend additional weeks — now jeopardize sensitive diplomatic negotiations and delicate national-security operations, which were designed to extirpate TdA’s presence in our country before it gains a greater foothold.”
In addition to this case, the Supreme Court is also weighing requests for emergency relief arising from challenges to Mr. Trump’s executive order seeking to end birthright citizenship, the mass firings of federal probationary workers and the Department of Education’s cancellation of teacher preparation grants that purportedly funded diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
Melissa Quinn is a politics reporter for CBSNews.com. She has written for outlets including the Washington Examiner, Daily Signal and Alexandria Times. Melissa covers U.S. politics, with a focus on the Supreme Court and federal courts.
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