Virtually everyone understands the real reason why Donald Trump is sending ICE agents to round up immigrants who have no criminal record and then send them to a gulag in El Salvador. Trump is a lifelong flat-out racist who is being steered by deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller, a guy who virtually inhales white nationalist conspiracy theories. But there's no law that gives the president unilateral authority to deport or imprison people without due process just because he dislikes nonwhite people. He needs some kind of legal justification, so Trump is claiming — don't laugh! — that the U.S., without knowing it, is at war with Venezuela.
Trump has dredged up a 1798 law called the Alien Enemies Act, which gives the president broad powers during a "declared war" or "invasion" to detain immigrants from an enemy nation. Government prosecutors claim, on no real evidence, that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is sending members of the gang Tren de Aragua into the U.S. as a de facto military invasion aimed at "harming United States citizens, undermining public safety, and supporting the Maduro regime’s goal of destabilizing democratic nations in the Americas." This argument is a joke on its surface. Few of the people arrested so far, if any, are clearly members of Tren de Aragua, and that criminal organization is not invading the U.S. in any normal sense of the word. Maduro is no doubt a bad guy, but he isn't sending a covert military force to attack the U.S.
