By Matthew Vadum via The Epoch Times,
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito issued a strongly worded dissent from the court’s order issued early on April 19 that temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s deportation of alleged members of the Venezuelan criminal gang Tren de Aragua.
The dissent, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, was posted on the court’s website early on April 20 .
“In sum, the court granted unprecedented and legally questionable relief literally in the middle of the night, without giving the lower courts an opportunity to rule, without hearing the opposing party within eight hours of receiving the petition, with dubious factual support for its order, and without providing an explanation for its order,” Alito wrote.
“I refused to join the court order because we had no reason to believe that issuing an order at midnight was necessary or appropriate in the circumstances.”
“Both the executive and the judiciary are bound by the law. The executive must act in accordance with our order in Trump v. JGG, and this court should follow established procedures,” Alito wrote.
He wrote that the judges acted even though “it is not clear whether the court had jurisdiction” or authority to hear the case.
“The documents before us, which alleged that the applicants were in imminent danger of deportation, did not support this claim,” Alito wrote.
In Trump v. JGG, the Supreme Court granted the president’s request on April 7 to block a federal district judge’s orders preventing his administration from using the Alien Enemies Act to deport suspected members of the Tren de Aragua, but ruled that the detainees must be given the opportunity to challenge their removal.
An unsigned one-page administrative stop order issued early on April 19 to which Alito referred ordered the federal government “not to remove from the United States any member of the presumed class of detainees until further order of the court.”
The administrative stay gives judges more time to review an emergency request to block deportation. That ruling did not explain why the court acted.
The order was issued after the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed an emergency petition on behalf of two Venezuelan citizens late on April 18, asking the Supreme Court to immediately block their deportation.
The emergency relief petition in AARP and WMM v. Trump challenges President Donald Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport illegal immigrants who are alleged or confirmed to be members of a criminal gang. AARP and WMM are the initials of the two men who were detained.
According to the filing, the ACLU also sought a temporary restraining order from the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia and a stay of the deportation order from the Fifth Circuit.
On March 14, Trump signed Proclamation 10903, in which he officially declared that Tren de Aragua, a designated foreign terrorist organization, is “committing, attempting, and threatening an invasion or predatory incursion into the territory of the United States.”
The group exploits mass illegal immigration into the United States to harm U.S. citizens, undermine public safety, and support the goal of the socialist regime in Venezuela, with which it is affiliated, to destabilize “democratic countries in the Americas, including the United States,” the announcement said.
The president used the Alien Enemies Act to authorize the “immediate arrest, detention, and deportation” of members of the group who are Venezuelan citizens at least 14 years old and who are not U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents of the United States.
The petition states that the ACLU clients are challenging the Trump administration’s use of federal law to deport them. The clients “are at immediate and ongoing risk of being deported from the United States without notice or opportunity for a hearing, in direct violation of the court’s order in Trump v. JGG.”
According to the April 18 statement, many people have already been loaded onto buses, presumably heading to the airport, and are facing deportation to prison in El Salvador.
On March 15, the Trump administration used the Alien Enemies Act to deport at least 137 Venezuelans to El Salvador, where they are now imprisoned “possibly for the rest of their lives” in the Salvadoran Counterterrorism Center, “one of the most notorious prisons in the world,” the request said.
The request alleged that many of those deported since March 15 were not members of Tren de Aragua.
“Such false accusations are particularly devastating given the strong claims of current applicants for relief under our immigration laws,” the petition said.
The request came one day after U.S. District Judge James Wesley Hendrix for the Northern District of Texas denied the ACLU clients’ request for a temporary restraining order to halt deportation proceedings.
Hendrix rejected the ACLU’s claim that his clients face “imminent risk of speedy removal” because the government dismissed the charges.
Late on April 19, Attorney General D. John Sauer urged the Supreme Court to reject the request.
“At the very least, if the court upholds its administrative stay, the government respectfully requests that the court clarify that it is only administratively staying removals under the [Alien Enemies Act] and that its order does not preclude removals under any other immigration authority,” Sauer wrote.
