The U.S. Supreme Court has vacated a district court’s order to stop deporting illegal-alien Venezuelan criminals and terrorists under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.
The high court ruled 5-4 yesterday that federal Judge James Boasberg, of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., erred in blocking the Trump administration from deporting five detainees. The detainees sued the administration on the wrong grounds, the court ruled, which in turn meant they sued in the wrong district.
The court also ruled that the administration must notify the criminals before they are deported.
The ruling means that the administration can again begin deporting the savage Venezuelans who, as members of the vicious Tren de Aragua (TdA) gang, are responsible for rapes, murders, and other crimes nationwide.
Terrorists and Criminals
The Biden administration allowed TdA to establish a nationwide network by unlawfully “paroling” them at the border and flying them directly into the country. The gang immediately set about terrorizing and committing heinous crimes against Americans. Members assaulted cops in New York. They took over hotels and apartment buildings. One gang member murdered nursing student Laken Riley.
As he promised, President Donald Trump signed an executive order on January 20 that designated drug cartels and crime gangs as terrorist organizations. The order named TdA and seven other gangs, and shortly thereafter the State Department published its list. Attorney General Pam Bondi then announced that the Justice Department will charge cartel and gang leaders and managers with capital crimes, both as terrorists and racketeers and as foreign narcotics kingpins who run continuing criminal enterprises and violate machinegun laws.
A crucial item in Trump’s invoking the Alien Enemies Act on March 15 is his declaring that Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro has sponsored TdA:
TdA operates in conjunction with Cártel de los Soles, the Nicolas Maduro regime-sponsored, narco-terrorism enterprise based in Venezuela, and commits brutal crimes, including murders, kidnappings, extortions, and human, drug, and weapons trafficking. TdA has engaged in and continues to engage in mass illegal migration to the United States to further its objectives of harming United States citizens, undermining public safety, and supporting the Maduro regime’s goal of destabilizing democratic nations in the Americas, including the United States.
Though The New York Times falsely claimed that Trump was wrong, the Miami Herald, citing a former CIA official, reported that Trump was right; some 300 TdA members have received paramilitary training from the Maduro regime.
Deported
Thus did the deportations begin, with TdA members landing in El Salvador’s no-nonsense Terrorist Confinement Center. They will never return to the United States.
Five illegals sued the administration, and far-left, pro-terrorist Boasberg ordered Trump to stop the deportations. Apparently believing his extemporaneous commands in court extend to Central America, Boasberg verbally ordered planes not to depart. But verbal orders, the administration argued, don’t count, and the planes departed before his written order. Crucially, the written order did not say the planes must turn around.
While the administration did not deport the five illegals, Trump ignored Boasberg and sent the other illegals back where they belong.
SCOTUS Decision
SCOTUS vacated Boasberg’s pro-terrorist order for two reasons. One, the five illegals did not use a habeas petition that alleged unlawful detention. And two, they filed the case in the wrong court.
“Initially, the detainees sought relief in habeas among other causes of action, but they dismissed their habeas claims,” the majority wrote. But their challenge to the administration using the enemies statute, “which largely precludes judicial review … must be brought in habeas.”
As well, “for ‘core habeas petitions,’ ‘jurisdiction lies in only one district: the district of confinement,’” the court ruled, citing Rumsfeld v. Padilla, a case involving an al Qaeda terrorists who is a U.S. citizen:
The detainees are confined in Texas, so venue is improper in the District of Columbia. As a result, the Government is likely to succeed on the merits of this action.
The government must also give detained terrorists and criminals “reasonable time” to file a habeas petition, the court ruled.
Trump responded to the victory on Truth Social. “The Supreme Court has upheld the Rule of Law in our Nation by allowing a President, whoever that may be, to be able to secure our Borders, and protect our families and our Country, itself,” he wrote.
Said Bondi:
Tonight’s decision is a landmark victory for the rule of law. An activist judge in Washington, DC does not have the jurisdiction to seize control of President Trump’s authority to conduct foreign policy and keep the American people safe.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem repeated her warning for illegal-alien criminals to leave the country.
“LEAVE NOW or we will arrest you, lock you up and deport you,” she wrote on X.
Dissent
The majority decision came from Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Clarence Thomas.
Dissenting were the court’s four women: far-left Associate Justice Sonya Sotomayor, who wrote what hate-Trump CNN called a “searing dissent,” along with Elena Kagan, Ketanji Brown Jackson, and increasingly liberal Amy Coney Barrett. Barrett is the mother of two adopted Haitian children.
“Funneling plaintiffs’ claims into individual habeas actions across the Nation risks exposing them to severe and irreparable harm” and could “have life or death consequences,” she wrote:
Individuals who are unable to secure counsel, or who cannot timely appeal an adverse judgment rendered by a habeas court, face the prospect of removal directly into the perilous conditions of El Salvador’s CECOT, where detainees suffer egregious human rights abuses.
Sotomayor fretted that the administration’s “conduct in this litigation poses an extraordinary threat to the rule of law.” She also declared that “we, as a Nation and a court of law, should be better than this.”
For his part, Boasberg faces impeachment in the U.S. House of Representatives.
