Texas judge blocks use of Alien Enemies Act!
New York, New York May 1 (EFE). –
A United States federal judge on Thursday barred President Donald Trump’s administration from using the 18th-century Alien Enemies Act to expedite the deportation of a group of Venezuelans detained in a migrant center in Texas.
Judge Fernando Rodriguez, appointed by Trump in his first term (2017-2021) to the Texas Southern District in Brownsville, issued the ruling in response to a class-action lawsuit.
Three of the plaintiffs are Venezuelans detained at the El Valle center in Raymondville, who deny being part of the transnational gang Aragua train (Tren de Aragua) and argue that the use of the century-old law deprives them of due process enshrined in the US Constitution.
The ruling comes after the Supreme Court blocked the same expulsions on April 19.
Judge Rodriguez’s ruling prohibits the government from using the law, which has only been used in times of war, which Trump invoked on March 14 to expel hundreds of Venezuelans accused of belonging to the criminal group Tren de Aragua.
The executive branch “possesses the lawful authority under the AEA, and based on the Proclamation, to detain Venezuelan aliens, transfer them within the United States, or remove them from the country.”
“Allowing the President to unilaterally define the conditions when he may invoke the AEA, and then summarily declare that those conditions exist, would remove all limitations to the Executive Branch’s authority under the AEA, and would strip the courts of their traditional role of interpreting Congressional statutes to determine whether a government official has exceeded the statute’s scope,” the judge wrote.
Wednesday’s decision comes after the Trump administration deported 200 migrants, most of them Venezuelans, to a maximum security prison in El Salvador on March 15 under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. EFE nqs/mcd
