Washington – The ruling of the Supreme Court, which allows the Trump administration to continue deporting immigrants under a law of war of the 18th century was acclaimed as a victory both by the federal government and those who challenged deportations.
The Superior Court left many questions about the law without a response, experts said, which explains, in part, the contradictory reactions to the decision on Monday night.
The divided court agreed that the Trump administration can use the Alien enemies law to deport the alleged members of a foreign gang, provided they are given the right to challenge the government's claim.
“The critical point of this ruling is that the Supreme Court said that individuals should receive due process to challenge their elimination under the alien enemies law,” wrote Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the Immigrant Rights Project of the Union of US civil liberties, which leads the lawsuit, in a statement. “That is an important victory.”
President Trump, writing on his social media platform, social truth, focused on the other key part of the Court's ruling: “The Supreme Court has confirmed the rule of law in our nation by allowing a president, whoever, to ensure our borders and protect our families and our country.
The ruling generates the orders of the District Court and the appeal judges who had arrested deportations and said the administration had exceeded its power.
The court did not decide a major problem: if the use of the administration of the law of alien enemies enemies is constitutional.
The families of many people deported under the law said they are not gang members. More than 100 men accused of belonging to the Venezuelan Gang Train of Aragua were sent to a maximum security prison in El Salvador.
Although the court argued that the detainees have the right to challenge their removal, the defenders of the immigrants said that this comes with a capture: the people held for deportation will have to present individual requests in the district where they are detained, a difficult process for someone arrested in, for example, California, but in Texas, far from the family and the lawyers.
Immigration officials sent many detainees to Texas before deportation to El Salvador.
On Tuesday, ACLU and other plaintiffs filed an emergency lawsuit in the Federal Court of New York to stop the removals under the law of alien enemies for persons within the jurisdiction of that court.
Senator Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) And three other democratic members of the Senate Judicial Committees and the Chamber issued a statement on Tuesday by saying that the Supreme Court ruling “will undoubtedly damage the people trapped in this oppressive nightmare.”
“Although the court unanimously agreed that deportations without due process are illegal, the reality is that the Trump administration has been quickly and wrong about the people, and has taken the position that those deportedly deported may be confined to foreign prisons without repair,” the legislators wrote. “The court requirement that challenges occur through individual habit requests will make people successfully challenge their removals before they occur.”
The Alien enemies Law was last used during World War II and, according to an overview of national archives, was used to stop more than 31,000 people from Japan, Germany and Italy. Three times more people of Japanese descent, mostly American citizens, were carried out in imprisonment fields.
The experts, including Tom Jawetz, a former senior lawyer of the National Security Department under the Biden administration, are skeptical that immigrants attacked under the war law will really be given enough time to find lawyers and challenge their deportations.
“While the court provided a kind of mixed victory, I think there are very good reasons to worry about the lack of the process to be given to these people,” he said. “With an administration that triggers first and really does not ask questions, I think we are going to see many more mistakes that take place through this type of moving.”
Lindsay Toczylowski, co -founder and Executive Director of the Imigrant Defenders Law Center based in Los Angeles, represents a gay makeup artist who was looking for asylum when the Trump administration deported him to the Salvadoran prison. The authorities cited their crown tattoos as evidence that he was a member of the Train of Aragua.
Toczylowski said that the review of due process required by the Supreme Court will be a disaster in practice.
“Most of the people sent by force to El Salvador were not represented,” he wrote in X. Referring to his arrest in Texas, he added: “Trump transferred them on purpose to remote detention centers in the pre-reference of TX.”
Once these cases begin to light through the judicial system and one arrives at the Supreme Court, the public will quickly see what the court really thinks about the use of the war law, said Gabriel “Jack” Chin, a teacher who studies the intersection of criminal law and immigration in UC Berkeley.
“I'm not worried yet,” he said.
Jawetz said that the Supreme Court, among them, remains to answer many questions: what happens to those already deported under the alien enemies law? Can this authority be invoked in times of war during a time of peace and against a non -governmental entity?
With the deportation pause raised, those questions could now make their way through the judicial system in a much more hurried and chaotic way, Jawetz said.
In a separate decision on Monday, the Supreme Court arrested the order of a lower court that required the Trump administration to return a Maryland man that the Trump administration lawyers admitted that he was erroneously deported to the prison of El Salvador.
These yields ordered by the Court are somewhat rare but they have taken place. The administration has said that it has no way to bring man, Kilmar Abrego García, who was not deported under the Alien enemies law.
If the judges decide that the Trump administration cannot be forced to bring Abrego García back to the United States, “there is a very limited hope that the courts intervene and say that any of these people who have been sent to rot in the saving prison have the opportunity to reach the Court,” said Jawetz.
