For the past few months, immigrants around the country have been suing the Trump administration at a furious pace, seeking to stop it from deporting them to a prison in El Salvador under an agreement reached this year between the White House and Nayib Bukele, the Salvadoran president.
The cases, which have been filed in at least six states, have largely focused on the legal tool that Trump officials have been using to expel them from the country: an 18th century wartime law called the Alien Enemies Act.
But on Thursday, a group of immigrant rights organizations and criminal defense lawyers took a different approach to stopping the deportations to El Salvador. They filed a lawsuit asking a federal judge to invalidate the underlying agreement between the U.S. and Salvadoran governments by declaring it unlawful.
“Disappearing people into foreign black sites is un-American,” said Skye Perryman, the president and chief executive of Democracy Forward, a nonprofit legal group that help to file suit. “It is not immigration policy — it’s an abuse of power.”
The suit, filed in Federal District Court in Washington, makes several arguments that the agreement between the White House and the Bukele administration is illegal. The lawyers say it has resulted in violations of constitutional due process protections, the right to a public trial and the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.
The suit also claims that the agreement bypasses traditional immigration law and violates the United Nations Convention Against Torture because the prison to which scores of migrants have been sent, the so-called Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, is a notoriously brutal facility known for human rights abuses.
While at least three federal judges overseeing deportation cases have ordered the administration to provide them with a copy of the agreement, it has not yet been made public.
Alan Feuer covers extremism and political violence for The Times, focusing on the criminal cases involving the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and against former President Donald J. Trump.
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