The US supreme court may have ruled that the Trump administration could continue using an 18th-century wartime law to deport Venezuelan immigrants it accused of being gang members – but it also notably impeded the government’s reliance on summary deportation without due process in such situations.
Monday’s emergency ruling lifted a temporary block on the controversial deportations. The legal challenge to the removals had been brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the organization Democracy Forward on behalf of the men deported to El Salvador last month without so much as a court hearing. The organizations argued that the Trump administration acted unlawfully when it bypassed immigration laws and ordered their removal under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, or AEA. The US government last invoked the law to detain Japanese, Italian and German nationals during the second world war.
