The Alien Enemies Act does NOT give Trump authority to abduct and deport
Robert Reich
May 1
Friends,
A federal judge today ruled that Trump doesn’t have authority to use the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport Venezuelan migrants without a hearing.
It’s a major blow to the regime’s deportation blitz, which has so far summarily removed 130 immigrants residing in the United States to a brutal prison in El Salvador.
The Act is only applicable in times of war, said the judge, Fernando Rodriguez Jr. But, he noted, we are not at war with Venezuela — notwithstanding the regime’s claim that the U.S. is being invaded by a Venezuelan gang.
The judge said:
“The President cannot summarily declare that a foreign nation or government has threatened or perpetrated an invasion or predatory incursion of the United States, followed by the identification of the alien enemies subject to detention or removal.”
This is the first federal court to permanently invalidate the Trump regime’s legal justification for using the Act, and a giant middle finger to the Trump regime’s efforts to centralize power in White House.
Fraud, waste, and abuse: Those are the things that inspectors general across the federal government are tasked with investigating. These watchdogs have been a key layer of oversight for decades, so it was alarming that one of the first moves President Donald Trump made in January was to fire at least 17 of them.
That’s why I wanted to sit down with Larry Turner, one of those fired watchdogs. Larry was inspector general for the US Department of Labor and had been an IG at the Department of Defense and the Army before that. Larry says the mass firing of IGs like himself was about power and politics more than anything. He finds it impossible to believe that DOGE, which Trump has tasked with finding fraud and waste, is uncovering these issues within days when, in actuality, it took his office up to a year to properly investigate similar claims.
I talk with Larry about all this and more on this week’s episode ofMore To The Story. It’s the first time he’s told his full story publicly. I hope you take a listen.
The former inspector general for the US Labor Department on losing his job and the dangers of DOGE.
BY REVEAL
Fraud, waste, and abuse.
That’s what inspectors general are tasked with investigating throughout the federal government. For decades, these watchdogs have been a key layer of oversight, working to ensure agencies are spending taxpayer money wisely. But in his first week in office, President Donald Trump did something unprecedented. He fired at least 17 IGs—more than any president in history—without notifying Congress or providing a substantive rationale for doing so, both of which are required by federal statute.
Trump, instead, said he would “put good people in there that will be very good.”
On this week’s episode of More To The Story, host Al Letson talks with one of those fired IGs, Larry Turner of the US Department of Labor. This is his first extended interview since being fired.
“It was a power purge to get rid of the people, the watchdogs, that actually provide oversight,” he says of Trump’s mass firings. “We are really the eyes and the ears for the American public.”
Trump has authorized Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to root out the same kind of fraud, waste, and abuse that congressionally authorized IGs are typically responsible for investigating.
Turner has spent much of his career as an IG, including stints at the Department of Defense and the Army. Since 2021, he’d overseen hundreds of employees who worked to publicize waste within the Labor Department. His office uncovered widespread unemployment insurance fraud after the COVID-19 pandemic. So far, 2,000 people have been for filing fraudulent claims that cost U.S. taxpayers $47 billion.
Turner is now one of eight IGs suing the Trump administration to be reinstated. He describes Trump’s effort to oust IGs as a threat to democracy itself.
“They have basically dismantled the civil service,” Turner says. “What they have done is cruel.”
SPONSORED CONTENT BY NOVA UKRAINE
Join Us – Stand for Ukraine; Stand for American Values
On April 6, support Ukraine’s fight for liberty and make your voice heard in Washington, D.C. Join Nova Ukraine and fellow organizations to show Congress that Americans stand for the values they believe in — and for a just and lasting peace in Ukraine. Your voice matters. Learn more here.
Earlier this month, President Donald Trump used the Alien Enemies Act to deport 238 Venezuelans from the United States—sending them not to their home country, but to a prison in El Salvador notorious for its harsh conditions.
The administration accuses them of belonging to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, butsome of them deny the allegations, with witnesses and expertsto back them up. When they arrived at El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, they were shackled and led to crowded cells.None of them had received a deportation hearing. “Nazis got better treatment under the Alien Enemies Act,” US Appeals Court Judge Patricia Millett, who is hearing a case about their removal, said Monday.
The Terrorism Confinement Center, also known as CECOT, is the biggest prison in Latin America. Juanita Goebertus, who leads Human Rights Watch’s Americas division, recently testified to a US court about the dismal conditions there. “We are terribly concerned,” she told me.
At CECOT, according to CNN journalists who had a rare look inside, men are held 23.5 hours a day in cells containing about 80 inmates each, with no programs for rehabilitation. The lights are on 24/7, except in solitary confinement, where it’s pitch black. The Salvadoran government says no prisoner who enters the prison will ever leave.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is visiting El Salvador today to tour the prison and meet with President Nayib Bukele; his administration received $6 million from the US government to house the Venezuelan immigrants, who now face tough circumstances on several levels. For one, El Salvador is in a state of emergency, so “you don’t have due process laws,” Goebertus said. I spoke with her late last week to understand more about these unprecedented deportations.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.
How unusual is this situation, where the United States has sent hundreds of immigrants without a hearing to a country they’re not from?
It’s highly unusual. In principle, the US can establish agreements with what US law calls “safe third countries.” For example, there’s been an agreement with Canada. The general premise is that even if a person has an asylum claim that the US has to respond to, the US is sending that person to a place where that person will still be able to file that claim. So it’s legal. During the first Trump administration, there were agreements signed with El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. However, those agreements were disbanded by the Biden administration.
The reason this [deportation to El Salvador] is so strange and unprecedented is that we have no evidence that new third-country agreements have been signed, neither with El Salvador nor with Costa Rica or Panama, the other two countries that are now receiving deportees of other nationalities under the Trump administration. About 300 people were deported to Panama—people from Iran, Afghanistan, China, Russia, several places in Africa like Cameroon. Some were sent back to their countries by Panama, and some of them remain with temporary status in Panama for 90 days. In Costa Rica, there’s 200 people, 80 are children, and they’re still detained at an immigration center.
As for how unprecedented it is, El Salvador is unlike Costa Rica and Panama, which have operating legal systems with judicial independence. In El Salvador, because of the state of emergency, you don’t have due process laws. This is certainly in violation of being a “safe third country.” This is not a system that will protect asylum claims.
[Editor’s note: In 2022, Bukele declared a state of emergency to tackle gang violence. In doing so, he suspended constitutional rights in El Salvador, including the right to an attorney. Since then, about 87,000 people have been arrested across the country, more than 1 percent of the population.]
How concerned are you for these Venezuelans?
We are terribly concerned, first because of the violation of migration procedures in the US. Second, because these people have been deported under a claim that they’re criminals, without any evidence. There’s been extensive reporting that several of the people deported had no criminal activity. We are starting to document cases, and in several of them, we’ve been able to establish no membership in Tren de Aragua.
“El Salvador is a place where the jail system is severely violating the human rights of inmates.”
Thirdly, we’re concerned because El Salvador is a place where the jail system is severely violating the human rights of inmates. This is very clear to the US administration, and yet they are deciding to send people.
Tell me about CECOT.
We haven’t been able to enter CECOT. As far as we know, no human rights association has been allowed inside.
CECOT has been described by the Salvadoran government as a place to confine leaders of gangs. As far as we have been able to document, nobody who has entered has been able to leave. It was first announced to have a capacity of 20,000 detainees, but then the Salvadoran government later reported it had a 40,000-person capacity. We have never been able to document that it created any infrastructure change to double its capacity.
There’s been a problem of overcrowding in El Salvador prisons historically, so building new spaces would be desirable. This jail, however, has been used by the Bukele regime to promote his propaganda. All those images of supposed gang members with their tattoos, coming in stripped? They’re taken at CECOT.
How do conditions there compare with conditions in US detention facilities?
Since Human Rights Watch has not been able to enter CECOT, what we have been able to describe are the conditions in other [Salvadoran] prisons. In the three years of the state of emergency, 350 people have died in custody without any explanation or any investigation of the Salvadoran government. These are places in which we’ve documented torture, lack of access to medication, lack of access to adequate food. We’ve documented the extensive restrictions on due process, the fact that people are held without being seen by a judge, without evaluating evidence, without warrants, without the presence of a lawyer, without being able to contact family. There are hearings of 500 people at the same time. People have, in many cases, been imprisoned for over a year without legal recourse.
What hope do the deported Venezuelans have of getting out? Do they have any recourse?
In the El Salvador judicial system, no, I don’t see any legal recourse. In the US? Yes. There are proceedings, including in the District of Columbia, that could potentially order these people returned to the US. Courts could potentially order access to CECOT to their lawyers and their partners to be able to verify the conditions in which these people are being held.
[Editor’s note: On Monday, lawyers hired by the Venezuelan government presented a habeas corpus lawsuit to El Salvador’s Supreme Court on behalf of 30 Venezuelans. It’s unclear what relief they might get; the judges hearing the case are reportedly allies of Bukele.]
What’s the relationship between Bukele and Trump, or do you know how they struck this deal?
There’s a clear public ideological affiliation that goes back to Bukele going to some of the CPAC meetings [the annual gathering of US conservatives]. That could explain in part why this agreement is taking place.
The US government has assumed some Venezuelans are connected to the Tren de Aragua gang because of their tattoos. What do you think about this?
First, from experts on Tren de Aragua, it’s very clear that there’s a complete lack of investigation on behalf of the US authorities, because Tren de Aragua does not use tattoos to identify its members.
But in all the interviews we’ve made so far with families, the issue of tattoos is a recurrent element. There is a pattern of stigmatizing people because of the tattoos, regardless of the meaning of the specific tattoo. From what has already been public in some judicial proceedings in the US, tattoos that might refer to very different things are interpreted as a way of identifying gang membership. There are even problems of US officials not understanding Spanish and what the tattoo says in Spanish.
To what extent is Tren de Araguaactually a threat in the United States?
With the Alien Enemies Act, the US is trying to refer to an invasion or a situation of armed conflict, which does not apply to the circumstance. It’s not true today, and it was certainly not true a couple years ago, when the amount of migrants reaching the southern border was much higher, amid a humanitarian crisis associated with the Venezuelan regime, which is a dictatorship and has had more than 7 million people displaced out of the country. That’s the reason for the migration: people trying to rebuild their lives and the future for their kids. It’s not an invasion and certainly not a military invasion.
“With the Alien Enemies Act, the US is trying to refer to an invasion or a situation of armed conflict, which does not apply to the circumstance.”
The Trump administration has very specifically tried to depict all Venezuelans as criminals and members of Tren de Aragua, which is very far from reality. When there have been members of Tren de Aragua who commit crimes, what needs to happen is effective prosecution of gang members, particularly concentrated on their leaders, making sure there is a serious and effective investigation into their money laundering and armed trafficking schemes, into their recruitment mechanisms in different places of the region. None of that is happening, and none of that will be able to happen while portraying general Venezuelans as members of Tren de Aragua and deporting them to places like El Salvador.
The Trump administration sent Venezuelans to El Salvador’s most infamous prison. Their families are looking for answers.
BY NOAH LANARD AND ISABELA DIAS
MOTHER JONES MEMBERSHIP UPDATE
THIS IS READER-SUPPORTED JOURNALISM
Our nonprofit newsroom has a lot of hard, consequential work to do in the year ahead, and that’s why we need your support right now. It’s simple: without it, we can’t do our job.
Independent, truth-telling media needs newsletter readers like you to step up and donate. Every dollar you chip in will help us produce the journalism that is needed at this crucial moment.
