The Trump administration submitted a seemingly innocuous memo to a federal court this month to legally justify its unprecedented attack and takeover of Venezuela, but when analyzed under scrutiny, the memo could be interpreted as an effort to grossly expand President Donald Trump’s authority to deploy the military to U.S. cities, warned columnist Jason Willick Sunday.
The aforementioned memo was submitted by the Justice Department to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit on Jan. 5, two days after the U.S. attack on Venezuela, in which the agency argued that the attack was justified under the Alien Enemies Act, a 1798 law that grants the president the authority to arrest and deport foreign nationals.
Trump first invoked the Aliens Enemies Act in March to justify his campaign to arrest and deport migrants to foreign nations, including El Salvador. But the Justice Department’s use of the law to defend the Venezuela strike raised questions for Willick about the agency’s underlying intent.
“Technically, the memo was to inform the court of Maduro’s indictment and the ties it alleges between his regime and Tren de Aragua,” Willick wrote in a column published in The Washington Post Sunday.
“But in context, the message is more pointed: This is now a matter of presidential war policy – involving boots on the ground inside another state’s borders – that judges can’t second guess. If Trump says the U.S. is facing an invasion threat emanating from Venezuela, his judgment ought to control. It could work.”
In recent weeks, Trump has increased threats to deploy the U.S. military to quash opposition to the surge of immigration agents in American cities, and is reportedly considering invoking the 1807 Insurrection Act. And the DOJ’s supplementary memo citing the Alien Enemies Act, Willick warned, could very well be designed to help lay the legal groundwork for such an action.
“The Trump administration is offering a glimpse of how an ambitious administration leverage that asymmetry to its advantage,” Willick wrote. “It’s worth thinking about what more brazen attempts might look like.”
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