The core elements of the story are relatively straightforward. The Trump administration, eager to advance the president’s deportation agenda, announced that it had used the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 — a war measure with a tragically ugly history — to fly alleged Venezuelan gang members to El Salvador. The whole thing was filmed as part of a camera-ready spectacle.
Beyond this basic summary, however, there are all kinds of relevant details that have become highly controversial. Indeed, as my MSNBC colleague Clarissa-Jan Lim explained, there are intensifying concerns about whether the administration complied with U.S. District Judge James Boasberg’s order to turn a plane around on Saturday — questions that Trump’s Justice Department has struggled to answer.
But while that controversy is adjudicated, and questions about a possible constitutional crisis grow louder, there are related concerns about the White House’s case at a foundational level. The New York Times reported:
[B]eyond the Trump administration’s evident animus for the judge and the court, more basic questions remain unsettled and largely unanswered: Were the men who were expelled to El Salvador in fact all gang members, as the United States asserts, and how did the authorities make that determination about each of the roughly 200 people who were spirited out of the country even as a federal judge was weighing their fate?
Those inclined to take the White House’s claims at face value have been presented with a simple story: The administration successfully rounded up immigrant members of a Venezuelan gang called Tren de Aragua, put them on a plane, and sent them to a prison in El Salvador, where local officials have agreed to take these gang members off our hands for a price.
The list of relevant questions, however, is not short — and the lines of inquiry have gone largely unanswered. Were all of the people on the plane gang members? How were they identified? Were they undocumented immigrants? Did they commit any crimes? Are they even Venezuelan? What are their names? Have any of those affected received due process?
To be sure, there might be compelling answers to these questions, but so far, the White House and the Trump Justice Department have refused to engage with the lines of inquiry. Complicating matters, some of the officials’ vague answers have raised fresh questions: In a court document filed on Monday night, for example, Robert L. Cerna II, a senior Immigration and Customs Enforcement official, conceded that “many” of those deported did not have criminal records in American courts.
Vice President JD Vance, amplifying an Axios report on the Trump administration allegedly violating a court order on the Alien Enemies Act, wrote online this week, “There were violent criminals and rapists in our country. Democrats fought to keep them here. President Trump deported them.” It’s very easy to imagine members of the Republican base nodding along in agreement when reading missives like these, but the vice president’s demagoguery rings hollow: Neither Vance nor any of his colleagues have proven — to anyone — that the deportees were violent criminals and rapists, and no Democrats have “fought to keep them” in the United States. By all appearances, the White House appears to be operating under the assumption that Trump and his team have earned the benefit of the doubt. Given the president’s staggering record of brazen lies and deceptions, and Trump’s Justice Department clinging to secrecy, that assumption is plainly ridiculous. CORRECTION (March 19, 2025, 4:59 p.m. ET): A previous version of this post incorrectly stated the year of the Alien Enemies Act. It was 1798, not 1789.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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