Bluesky

This past week, the Trump administration revved the engines and, betting that its base would be enthused, barreled gleefully into a full-blown constitutional crisis.

On Saturday, Trump invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act—yes, the same one that was infamously used in World War II as justification for the placing into concentration camps of tens of thousands of Japanese Americans—against a Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua.

The legal rationale for this unprecedented action, which allows Trump’s ghastly deportation machine to entirely circumvent the judicial process and the immigration courts when dealing with alleged members of Tren de Aragua, was that the gang is invading the United States. While the gang is indeed responsible for many vicious crimes, there is no evidence to prove that it any way, shape, or form constitutes the advanced guard of a Venezuelan invasion force.

The ACLU immediately sued to block the use of this act, which it argued was never intended to be used against nongovernmental actors, and within hours US district judge James Boasberg, of the federal district court in Washington, DC, had issued a temporary restraining order.

Boasberg was later informed that several planeloads of Venezuelan men were being deported from holding facilities in southern US states to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT super-maximum-security prison, which already holds tens of thousands of gang members and alleged gang members of MS-13 and Barrio 18, and is arguably the harshest high-tech prison on earth. Human Rights Watch and other groups have documented widespread torture of suspected gang members and have also concluded that a large percentage of those in the facility aren’t affiliated with the murderous gangs but have simply been caught up in government sweeps as the country tries to retake control from gangs that at one point had led to El Salvador having the world’s highest murder rate.

Judge Boasberg hurriedly convened a court session, issued a written order prohibiting such flights from the US to El Salvador, and backed it up with an oral order that aircraft already on route to El Salvador turn around and return the deportees to US soil.

Despite Boasberg’s order to halt these deportation flights, filled with more than 200 Venezuelan men, the administration kept the planes flying, and hours after the order was issued, the aircraft landed in El Salvador. There, the men were severely manhandled by masked security personnel, who paraded them, bent double and chained, in front of the cameras; dragged them to the CECOT facility; forcibly shaved their heads; and dressed them in flimsy white prison garb and dumped them into overcrowded cell blocks—in which they will live without any access to outdoor recreation, with only the bare minimum of food (the same meatless meals every day, with no cutlery allowed), and with, it is alleged, routine torture. At least 80 people are crammed into each cell, and the men sleep on stacked steel bed frames with no mattresses. The human rights group Cristosal has documented at least 261 deaths in El Salvador’s prisons in the two years since the anti-gang crackdown began.

To the delight of Trump’s people, far-right populist El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele posted on social media an “Oopsie… too late” comment about the judge’s orders, and then announced that the deportees would face at least one year of hard labor in the CECOT facility. A Trump spokesman responded to Bukele’s message, “boom.” Such is decorum and diplomacy in this age of monsters.

In the days since, hundreds of Venezuelan families in the US have struggled to work out where their sons, husbands, or fathers are. Meanwhile, Trump and Musk have both called for Boasberg’s impeachment, with Trump writing that the judge is a “radical left lunatic, a troublemaker and agitator”—an astonishing attack on the independent judiciary that has to date met with a only a rather milquetoast critique from John Roberts, Supreme Court chief justice and midwife of the shameful Trump-is-king decision last year. ICE and Department of Justice officials have repeatedly stonewalled Boasberg’s demands for clarification about the timing of the flights. And the hard-right social media eco-system has been inundated with violent threats against Boasberg and other judges seeking to uphold the rule of law in the face of Trump’s escalating attacks on due process.

Let’s be absolutely clear about what has transpired: To fulfill a campaign promise to his base, Trump has unleashed a deportation machine against hundreds of immigrants who may or may not be gang affiliated; the government has released scant details on who these men are, making it impossible to know if they have been convicted of any crimes. These men have then been sent to what might well be the worst prison on earth, thousands of miles from their families, and have been informed by El Salvador’s president that they will perform hard labor for the next year. That’s not just a lack of due process; it’s the literal enslavement of hundreds of people. And, whether it ultimately is ruled to be constitutional, it is monstrous both in its intent and its consequences.

“Oftentimes, the allegations of gang affiliations are because of tattoos, clothing, music,” Boston-based longtime immigration attorney Matt Cameron told me. “It doesn’t take very much to get listed with a gang affiliation.” Flash the wrong sign, listen to the wrong rap song, post the wrong thing on social media, ride in a car with gang members, get arrested with gang members—all this can get you onto a local police department or ICE database listing gang affiliates. It is, says Cameron, a catch-all, especially for young Latino men.

When, in February, the Trump administration flew dozens of immigrants it labeled the worst of the worst gang members to detention in Guantánamo Bay, organizations such as the Immigrant Defenders, and journalists such as Pablo Manriquez, investigated the claims. For most, they could find no evidence of gang membership. It is at least possible that it will similarly turn out that some, or many, of those sent to El Salvador are also simply victims of the dragnet. Their lives, and those of their families, will have been ruined at the altar of Trump’s sadistic obsessions.

Of course, once the Trump administration normalizes the use of the Alien Enemies Act against the country’s purported enemies—and once the flouting of court orders comes to be seen as business as usual—it will almost certainly expand its use not just against suspected Venezuelan gang members but against ever-greater numbers of people from ever-greater numbers of countries. It’s a way to short-circuit any form of due process in the immigration system. And, says Cameron, ultimately the usage of extra-constitutional powers against perceived enemies won’t stop with immigrants. “Immigration is the tip of the spear for civil rights,” he argues. What’s to simply stop a mass process of exiling opponents, so they can’t come back, he asks. “This is a really terrifying development that should concern every American. You’re sending someone to a place not under US jurisdiction that has known, sustained, human rights violations.”