Cnn
–
A federal federal judge appointed Donald Trump judged that the president illegally invoked the act of extraterrestrial enemies And prevented the administration from quickly deporting certain alleged members of a Venezuelan gang.
US District Judge Fernando Rodriguez, from the South Texas District, said Trump illegally invoked the scanning of the 18th century war authority to accelerate certain deportations. His decision means that Trump cannot count on the law to hold or expel any alleged member of the Venezuelan gang Tren of Aragua in his district.
The decision is an important blow for Trump’s decision in March to invoke the Act respecting extraterrestrial enemies, which has been faced with numerous judicial disputes and was interrupted by several courts. But Rodriguez’s decision is the first to conclude that the president has exceeded his authority based on a law that was to be used at the time when the United States was at war.
The Trump administration, wrote Rodriguez, “does not have legal authority under AEA and, on the basis of proclamation, to have Venezuelan foreigners, to transfer them to the United States or to remove them from the country.”
“The president cannot summarily declare that a foreign nation or government has threatened or perpetrated an invasion or a predatory incursion of the United States, followed by the identification of foreign enemies subject to detention or revocation,” wrote the judge.
He continued: “Allowing the president to unilaterally define the conditions in which he can invoke the AEA, then to declare summarily that these conditions existed, would suppress all the limits to the authority of the executive branch under the AEA, and would eliminate the courts of their traditional role of the interpretation of the laws of the Congress to determine if a government official has exceeded the scope of the status. The law does not support such a position. ”
Although the use by Trump of the Act respecting extraterrestrial enemies has been argued in several courts nationally, including the Supreme Court, Rodriguez is the first judge to have made a final decision on the merits.
“The importance of this decision cannot be overestimated,” said Lee Genernt, lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union who has helped to take up judicial dispute.
“This is the first court to decide squarely on the fundamental question of knowing whether a war authority can be used in peacetime and has correctly concluded that this cannot,” said Genernt.
The prosecution of the Venezuelans had narrowly avoided being sent to the Salvador under the Act on Extraterrestrial enemies when two flights took migrants to the notorious of Cecot prison in the country in March.
They continued to continue so that the administration could no longer try to expel them under the law on extraterrestrial enemies. The judge indicates that other immigration laws governing deportations could still be used and that men are still detained in an establishment in southern Texas.
Last month, the Supreme Court, without reaching the merits of Trump’s use of the law of 1798 for deportations, said that a sufficient opinion should be given by civil servants to targeted people under it so that migrants can raise judicial disputes if they wanted. The court also judged that the migrants that Trump Targets had to contest their withdrawal under a request to Habeas before a geographic jurisdiction court on the place where they are detained.
But this decision was light on the details, and weeks later, the judges were invited to intervene in one case in the Northern Texas district in which some Venezuelan migrants said they had not received adequate notice from the government’s intention to expel them quickly under the law.
In a middle of the middle of the night, the high court said that no one that the Trump administration was preparing to expel under the extraterrestrial enemy law which are held in a detention center in northern Texas can be deleted while considering the emergency call. The court still plans the request.
The administration is likely to appeal the decision of Rodriguez to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals Conservative, and the case may possibly land before the Supreme Court.
But there are distinct groups of detainees in different places across the country, such as in Colorado, Pennsylvania and Nevada, which the administration had prepared to expel using AEA, which makes the decisions of each judge before the lower courts, because several judicial cases like these continue this month.
The Administration argued that Trump was justified to use the Act respecting extraterrestrial enemies to target the alleged members of Tren of Aragua, which the government has appointed a foreign terrorist organization. But it is also said that the courts do not have the power to review the invocation by the president of the law, which Rodriguez firmly rejected on Thursday.
The judge acknowledged that even if he “cannot judge the veracity of factual declarations” made in the proclamation of Trump invoking the authority of the war, he “retains the authority to interpret the terms of the AEA and to determine whether the basis announced for the proclamation correctly invokes the status”.
John Fritze of CNN contributed to this report.
This story has been updated with additional details.