SOURCE :- THE AGE NEWS
The US Supreme Court has temporarily barred the Trump administration from deporting a group of Venezuelan migrants it accused of being gang members and was seeking to remove under a rarely used wartime law.
The court issued the order on Saturday, Washington, DC, time, after the men’s lawyers asked it to intervene on an emergency basis, saying they faced imminent deportation without the judicial review the justices previously ordered.
The case raises questions about whether US President Donald Trump, who has shown a willingness at times to defy court decisions since returning to office on January 20, will comply with limits set by the nation’s highest court. It carries the risk of a clash between two co-equal branches of government and a potential full-blown constitutional crisis.
“The government is directed not to remove any member of the putative class of detainees from the United States until further order of this Court,” the justices said in a brief, unsigned decision.
Conservative Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito publicly dissented from the decision.
The Trump administration later on Saturday filed paperwork urging the high court to reconsider its hold. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a post on X: “We are confident we will ultimately prevail against the onslaught of meritless litigation brought by radical activists.”
It was not immediately clear how many Venezuelans faced deportation or the location to which they would be sent.
The Trump administration has already deported to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador more than 200 Venezuelan and Salvadoran men it claims are gang members.
Those deportees included Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran immigrant who the administration admitted was removed by mistake, igniting an outcry over its immigration policy.
Many of the migrants’ lawyers and family members say they were not gang members and had no chance to dispute the government’s assertion that they were.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia (left), meets with Chris Van Hollen, a Democratic senator for Maryland, in prison in El Salvador.Credit: X / @ChrisVanHollen
The high court majority issued Saturday’s stay after American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) lawyers filed urgent requests for immediate action in multiple courts, including the Supreme Court, after reporting that some of the men already had been loaded aboard buses and were told they were to be deported.
The ACLU said the administration was poised to deport the men using a 1798 law that historically has been employed only in wartime without affording them a realistic opportunity to contest their removal – as the Supreme Court had ordered.
“These men were in imminent danger of spending their lives in a horrific foreign prison without ever having had a chance to go to court. We are relieved that the Supreme Court has not permitted the administration to whisk them away the way others were just last month,” Lee Gelernt, the ACLU’s lead attorney in the case, said in a statement on Saturday.
In an audio recording posted on TikTok, several men said they were Venezuelans falsely accused of being gang members and held at Bluebonnet immigration detention centre in Texas. They said they were taken to a regional airport late on Friday but then returned.
The recording has not been verified by Reuters. An earlier post on TikTok from the same account was cited in court filings on Friday.
More than 50 Venezuelans had been scheduled to be flown out of the country – presumably to El Salvador – from the immigration centre, The New York Times cited two people with knowledge of the situation as saying.
Elected last year on a promise to crack down on migrants, Trump invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act in a bid to swiftly deport accused members of Tren de Aragua, a criminal gang originating from Venezuelan prisons that his administration labels a terrorist group.
Trump and his senior aides have asserted that their executive power grants them wide authority on immigration matters, testing the balance of power between branches of government.
Reuters, AP
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