On Friday, March 14, President Donald Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a 1798 law giving him immense powers to deport noncitizens in a time of war.
His use of that law was aimed at Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang that he has repeatedly and falsely claimed as part of an invasion of criminal immigrants. Over the next 24 hours, more than 130 Venezuelans were deported to an El Salvadoran prison even as a U.S. judge ordered the planes carrying them to turn around.
Here’s what you need to know about the situation:
An 18th-century law
Trump had long promised to invoke the Alien Enemies Act to combat illegal immigration. The law crafted during the presidency of John Adams had been used just three times: during the War of 1812 and the two world wars.
The Trump administration had begun moving closer to calling the migrant issue a war, most notably by designating eight Latin American criminal groups, including Tren de Aragua, as “foreign terrorist organizations.”
Tattoos as gang markers
U.S. immigration authorities use a series of “gang identifiers” to spot members of Tren de Aragua. Some are obvious, such as trafficking drugs with known gang members.
Some are more surprising: Chicago Bulls jerseys, “high-end urban street wear,” and tattoos of clocks, stars and crowns, according to government instructional material filed in court by the American Civil Liberties Union.
Ordinary tattoos were key to marking many deported men as Tren members, according to documents and lawyers.
One of those men was a makeup artist who said he fled Venezuela after his boss at a state-run news channel publicly slapped him. In a country where political repression and open homophobia are both part of life, it’s hard to be a gay man who does not support President Nicolás Maduro.
Hoping to find a new life in America, Andry José Hernández Romero made his way north and arranged an appointment at a U.S. border crossing in San Diego.
There, he was asked about his tattoos. Romero has a crown tattooed on each wrist. One is next to the word “Mom.” The other next to “Dad.” The crowns, his lawyer says, also pay homage to his hometown’s Christmastime “Three Kings” festival, and to his work in beauty pageants.
Romero, who insists he has no ties to Tren, was transferred to a California detention center.
Then, around March 7, he was moved to a facility in Laredo, Texas, a three-hour bus ride from the South Texas city of Harlingen.
Gathering detained Venezuelans for deportation
Two days before the March 14 deportations, jets chartered by a branch of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement began landing in Harlingen from across the U.S., some carrying detained Venezuelans.
Court documents later showed that for at least the previous week, Venezuelan men in many immigration detention centers were being moved by bus and plane toward ICE’s El Valle Detention Facility, close to the Harlingen airport.
Then, a flight analyst for the advocacy group Witness at the Border noticed two Saturday flights scheduled from Harlingen to El Salvador. That was unusual. Deportations are fairly rare on Saturdays, as are deportation flights from Harlingen to El Salvador, said the analyst, Tom Cartwright, whose social media feeds are closely watched in immigration circles.
Immigration lawyers push back
On March 14, with the Alien Enemies Act hours from being invoked and more than a day from being announced, word was filtering out from a group of Venezuelan men held at El Valle. Around 3 a.m., roughly 100 had been awakened by guards and told they were being deported. Ten hours later, the men were back in their bunks. The flight had been canceled, they were told, and they would leave soon.
Within hours, an informal legal network was frantically trying to stop those deportations and working with Texas lawyers who would file federal court petitions.
Meanwhile, later that Friday, with signs growing that deportations could be imminent, two legal advocacy groups, the ACLU and Democracy Forward, felt they had to file preemptively.
They spent hours drafting a petition on behalf of five detained Venezuelans who feared being falsely labeled members of Tren and deported.
Finally, early Saturday morning they filed the petition with the U.S. District Court in Washington, seeking to halt all deportations under the Alien Enemies Act.
The judge weighs in
Later that day, Judge James E. Boasberg issued a temporary restraining order in response to the ACLU lawsuit and scheduled a 5 p.m. hearing.
In Texas, though, things began to move faster. Guards gathered prisoners at the El Valle detention center, ordering them onto buses for the airport. The flights carried a total of 261 deportees, the White House later said, including 137 Venezuelans deported under the Alien Enemies Act, 101 under other immigration regulations, and 23 El Salvadoran members of the gang MS-13.
About 4 p.m. the White House posted Trump’s proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act.
Roughly an hour later Boasberg opened his hearing over Zoom.
He asked whether the government planned to deport anyone under the proclamation “in the next 24 or 48 hours.” The ACLU warned that deportation planes were about to take off. Deputy Assistant Attorney General Drew Ensign said he was unsure of the flight details.
Eventually Boasberg issued a new order to stop deportations being conducted under the Alien Enemies Act. He said any planes in the air needed to come back.
“This is something that you need to make sure is complied with immediately,” he told Ensign.
By then, two ICE Air planes were heading across the Gulf of Mexico and toward Central America. Neither turned around.
‘Oopsie’
The next morning, El Salvador’s president tweeted a New York Post headline saying Boasberg had ordered the planes turned around.
“Oopsie … Too late,” Nayib Bukele wrote, adding a laughing/crying emoji.
The Trump administration is now urging the Supreme Court for permission to resume deportations of Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act. Boasberg soon could rule on whether there are grounds to find anyone in contempt of court for defying his court order.
As for Romero, the makeup artist, he’s somewhere in CECOT.
