The Alien Enemies Act is used to deport hundreds of people from Venezuela despite the Supreme Court decision

The case against deportation of Venezuelans under the Alien Enemies Act in the U.S. Bluebonnet Detention Center

The new Supreme court’s restrictions on how it can use the Alien Enemies Act is one of the reasons that the American Civil Liberties Union had warned immigration authorities to quickly restart removals. There was a group of people from Venezuela that were taken into custody at the Bluebonnet Detention Center. The migrants were going to be loaded onto the buses for their departure late Friday, according to Lee Gelernt.

“We are not going to reveal the details of counter terrorism operations, and we are complying with the Supreme Court’s ruling,” said Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security Tricia McLaughlin.

NPR was unable to independently confirm the number of people who may be deported from this facility. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security declined to provide details or answer additional questions about the case.

Late Thursday a group of Venezuelans detained in a Texas facility was advised that they would be immediately deported under the Alien Enemies Act, a rarely used 18th-century wartime law that allows for accelerated removal of foreigners deemed a threat by authorities.

ACLU lawyer Lee Gelernt told NPR that migrants at the Bluebonnet Detention Facility in Anson, Texas in the far northern end of the state were being loaded onto buses for removal late Friday.

Lawyers for the men launched a campaign to stop their deportation on Friday as two federal judges refused to step in. The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals has not yet made a decision.

“It doesn’t say you have the right to contest, you have the right to challenge anything. It’s just telling you here’s the notice, you’re getting removed,” Boasberg told Justice Department attorney Drew Ensign. That seems to be problematic to me.

The people slated for deportation will have a minimum of just 24 hours to challenge their removal in court, according to Drew Ensign from the Justice Department. He said there were no flights on Friday night and Saturday was unknown, but the Department of Homeland Security did have the right to remove people.

The Supreme Court of Appeals ruled that the Trump administration had the power to take away anyone who was a member of the gang, and a ban on their deportations

“I’m sympathetic to everything you are saying, I just don’t think I have the power,” judge Boasburg told the ACLU attorney, and said that it is now in the Supreme Court’s hands.

The Supreme Court’s rule that only judges have jurisdiction to halt the removal of people who are being held had led to probable cause that the Trump administration committed criminal contempt.

The Court has put a halt to the removals and we are very happy about it. These individuals were in imminent danger of spending the rest of their lives in a brutal Salvadoran prison without ever having had any due process,” ACLU lawyer Lee Gelernt said in an email.

The act has been used three times before, the most recent of which was during World War II. The Trump administration said it had the power to take away immigrants who identified themselves as members of the gang regardless of their immigration status.

There is no such order in the Texas area that covers Bluebonnet, which is located 24 miles north of Abilene in the north end of the state.

But the ACLU’s Friday filing included sworn declarations from three separate immigration lawyers who said their clients in Bluebonnet were given paperwork indicating they were members of Tren de Aragua and could be deported by Saturday. The immigration lawyer Karene Brown claimed that she had to sign the papers in English for a client who only spoke Spanish.

The temporary ban on the deportations of immigrants who exhausted their appeals to countries other than their home countries was made permanent on Friday by a Massachusetts judge.