Two more judges block the Trump administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport migrants
In this October 2023 photo
By Katelyn Polantz, CNN
(CNN) — Two more federal judges on Tuesday blocked the Trump administration’s use of deportations under the Alien Enemies Act, saying the wartime power shouldn’t be used.
District Judge Alvin Hellerstein said the administration is indefinitely blocked from removing migrants from the Southern District of New York under the act, which gives detainees little due process.
The judge said migrants could still be deported via more traditional immigration authorities.
Hellerstein, in his 22-page opinion earlier Tuesday, wrote that the use of the Alien Enemies Act violates constitutional protections that give people in the US due process.
“Petitioners have not been given notice of what they allegedly did to join (the gang Tren de Aragua), when they joined, and what they did in the United States, or anywhere else, to share or further the illicit objectives of the TdA,” Hellerstein wrote. Yet the Trump administration has used the alleged associations of Venezuelan migrants with Tren de Aragua as a reason to send them to El Salvador’s notorious mega-prison, he noted.
Hellerstein’s decision is the second time in two weeks a federal judge has harshly condemned the Trump administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act and adds to a trail of court decisions that has cut back the harsh and fast-moving deportation approach that’s become a centerpiece of President Donald Trump’s policy toward immigrants.
The Supreme Court and other appellate courts haven’t yet determined whether the law is being used legally, though the high court has given some direction on how migrants’ challenges to the act could proceed.
Hellerstein also wrote that the Trump administration hadn’t shown the US was under invasion by a hostile foreign power, as the Alien Enemies Act requires when it is used. It’s previously been invoked in the US during the War of 1812, World War I and World War II.
“There is nothing in the AEA that justifies a finding that refugees migrating from Venezuela, or TdA gangsters who infiltrate the migrants, are engaged in an ‘invasion’ or ‘predatory incursion,’” Hellerstein wrote. “They do not seek to occupy territory, to oust American jurisdiction from any territory, or to ravage territory. TdA may well be engaged in narcotics trafficking, but that is a criminal matter, not an invasion or predatory incursion.”
Hellerstein, in the opinion, described how the administration in March deported to El Salvador more than 130 undocumented migrants, some of whom were at one time held in his judicial district in New York.
“The sweep for removal is ongoing, extending to the litigants in this case and others, thwarted only by order of this and other federal courts,” the judge said. “The destination, El Salvador, a country paid to take our aliens, is neither the country from which the aliens came, nor to which they wish to be removed. But they are taken there, and there to remain, indefinitely, in a notoriously evil jail, unable to communicate with counsel, family or friends.“
Later Tuesday, Trump’s ability to rely on the Alien Enemies Act to speed up deportations took another hit when a federal judge in Colorado indefinitely blocked the president from using it to swiftly deport any migrants in that state.
The ruling from US District Judge Charlotte Sweeney, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, similarly said that Trump had likely exceeded his authority in trying to use the wartime authority for quick deportations.
Her 25-page preliminary injunction said that Trump’s invocation of the law had little to do with the statute’s original purpose. There is no active military invasion by a foreign nation that justified its invocation to allow officials to summarily remove alleged members of the Venezuelan gang, the judge concluded.
Like Hellerstein, Sweeney also noted that her ruling doesn’t preclude the administration from relying on other immigration laws to remove migrants in Colorado whom Trump wanted to deport under the Alien Enemies Act.
This story has been updated with additional details.
CNN’s Devan Cole and Piper Hudspeth Blackburn contributed to this report.
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