It Is Happening Every Day, Every Where
Judge James E. Boasberg’s order says that the Venezuelan immigrants should have the opportunity to challenge the accusation by the Trump administration that they are members of a gang.
The Venezuelan government attributed a willingness to receive the flights to the plight of Venezuelan migrants sent to notorious prisons in El Salvador with little to no due process.
A hearing on Friday afternoon could also include some discussion about the Justice Department’s repeated recalcitrance in responding to the judge’s demands.
To invoke wartime deportation powers, President Trump asserted that Venezuela’s government controls a gang. U.S. intelligence analysts think that is not true.
Officials have said most of the people sent to the U.S. base are members of a Venezuelan gang but have not offered evidence to support that claim.
The question of whether the deported Venezuelans actually have ties to Tren de Aragua could be raised at a hearing set for Friday in Federal District Court in Washington.
It remains unclear whether the Trump administration will apply the law in this way. But such an interpretation, experts say, would infringe on basic civil liberties.
The litigation unleashed by President Trump’s second term, combined with his distortions and lies, is testing the judicial system’s practice of deferring to the executive branch’s determinations about what is true.
In asking the judge to dissolve a temporary restraining order on deportation flights, the Justice Department opened another front in its aggressive pushback to his decisions.
A New York Times review of flight data showed that at the time of a federal judge’s order, two flights were in the air, and one had not yet taken off.