Last week, a Donald Trump-appointed judge in Texas deemed the president’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act “unlawful.” Blocking further deportations of alleged Venezuelan gang members under that law, U.S. District Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr. said the invocation didn’t meet the legal standard demanded by the 1798 wartime law.
In doing so, Rodriguez emphasized that he wasn’t delving into Trump’s factual assertions underlying his invocation, including the claim that the Venezuelan government directs the gang Tren de Aragua’s actions. Even if those claims were true, the judge found, the government still didn’t meet the legal standard, because the alleged conduct didn’t qualify as an “invasion” or “predatory incursion” under the law.
But a newly declassified memo undercuts that factual claim, too, leaving both the legal and factual basis of Trump’s invocation wanting.
The New York Times reported that the memo, released Monday, “confirms that U.S. intelligence agencies rejected a key claim President Trump put forth to justify invoking a wartime statute to summarily deport Venezuelans to a prison in El Salvador.” The Times reported that the memo “states that spy agencies do not believe that the administration of Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, controls a criminal gang, Tren de Aragua. That determination contradicts what Mr. Trump asserted when he invoked the deportation law, the Alien Enemies Act.”
This latest news comes as another judge, in New York, ruled against Trump’s invocation on Tuesday. Meanwhile, lawyers for people already sent to that Salvadoran prison are seeking their return in a case out of Washington, D.C., while the Supreme Court could weigh in at any time in yet another case on the subject (a different one from Texas). Ultimately, the justices could need to resolve the underlying legality of Trump’s invocation once and for all. The overall case against it is mounting. Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in the Trump administration’s legal cases.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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