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US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said hundreds of suspected members of the Venezuela gang were taken to El Salvador, a day after a federal judge blocked the Trump administration to use a centuries -old law to speed up expulsion.
Rubio said on the Social Media Platform X that more than 250 trains of Train De Aragua had been sent to El Salvador, whose president Nayib Bukele had agreed to keep them in “very good prisons of the country with a fair price that will also save our taxpayer dollars”.
An executive order from President Donald Trump over the weekend summoned the act of alien enemies of 1798 to remove suspected gang members, who said he had “illegally infiltrated the United States and was waging irregular warfare and taking hostile actions against the United States”.
Politics relies on an authority that was last called in World War II for non-American citizens of Italian, German and Japanese origin-one of the most controversial episodes in American history.
James Boasberg, a US federal judge in Columbia district, on Saturday blocked the expulsion of individuals in custody subject to executive order for 14 days.
Boasberg said the law called by Trump “did not provide a basis for the proclamation of the president given that the terms occupation, predatory incursion, are really about hostile actions committed by any nation and commensurate with war.”
In response, Pam Bondi, the US prosecutor General, said “the judge supported Train De Aragua’s terrorists for the security of the Americans”, adding that the order “ignores well -established authority over President Trump’s power, and he endangers the public and law enforcement”.
Rubio added that the US had also expelled two top leaders from the MS-13 “Plus 21 of the most sought after justice to face just right in El Salvador”.
In a statement, the White House said: “The Department of Internal Security successfully arrested nearly 300 train de Aragua terrorists, saving countless American lives. Thanks to the hard work of the State Department, these hated monsters were pulled out and fled to El Salvador, where they will no longer be able to present any threat to the American people.”
The executive order was the last escalation in Trump’s aggressive stalemate on immigration. The president has promised mass deportations while implementing measures, including the search for restricting the citizenship of the right to birth and the declaration of a national emergency on the US-Mexico border.
While the order targets members of Tren De Aragua, he states that “the internal security secretary retains discretion to capture and remove any foreign enemy under any particular authority”. This means that it can expand the implementation of a law that critics say can destroy the distribution of turbocharge while bypassing the right process.
“Involving the act of alien enemies is a dangerous abuse of power that aims to deprive people of their legal rights,” said Allison McMmanus, managing director of the Department of National Security and International Policy at the US Progress Center.
The government launched a foreign terrorist organization last month, after Trump on the first day of his second presidency led his cabinet to evaluate a range of groups including the Venezuelane gang for national security threats.
The executive order quoted Interpol Washington, who said “Train de Aragua has emerged as an important threat to the United States while infiltration of migration flows from Venezuela”.
Trump’s order stated that the gang “continues to conquer, try to conquer and threaten to conquer the country” – the rhetoric often used by the president when describing immigration policy.
Legal researchers have argued that referring to illegal immigration as a “occupation” can give Trump, according to the US law and the Constitution, the extensive powers to expel individuals massively or keep them in detention without trial.
The executive order came hours after the US Civil Freedom Union on Saturday filed a lawsuit on behalf of the five Venezuela men in detention on immigration, who were afraid of immediate removal if the act of alien enemies was called.
This measure would remove non-American citizens “without any possibility of judicial review,” ACLU said in judicial documents, adding that the statute in question was a “measure of war that has been used only three times in the history of our nation: the 1812 war, World War 1 and World War II”.
The government submitted an appeal to the District Court in the District of Columbia, challenging the temporary order of restricting Judge Boasberg.
