You need to know about the Alien Enemy Act of 1798
President Trump wants to summon the alien enemy law of 1798. This is something you need to know about wartime laws.
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration can resume deportation of certain migrants, the divided Supreme Court said Monday in a partial victory over President Donald Trump’s tough line approach to immigration.
The court did not control whether Trump could use alien enemy laws to deport immigrants. And the majority said that immigrants should have the opportunity to challenge their deportation.
But the ruling says immigrants brought their challenges — it was filed in US District Court for the District of Columbia — in the wrong court.
“The venue is inappropriate in the District of Columbia as detainees are locked up in Texas,” the majority wrote in an unsigned opinion that they had lifted the judge’s order from being temporarily fired without a hearing. The court has a conservative majority of 6-3. The three liberal judges were opposed by Amy Connie Barrett, partly of modest justice.
This decision allows the Department of Justice to use the law of 1798 to deport immigrants who are said to be members of Venezuelan criminal gangs.
“The Supreme Court has upheld the rule of law in our country by allowing a president to secure our borders and protect our families and our country,” Trump wrote on social media. “Amazing Day for American Justice!”
Judge Sonia Sotomayor wrote that he disputed the decision as “unprotected.”
“The actions of the government in this case pose an extraordinary threat to the rule of law. …We should be better than this, as a nation and as a court.”
Despite being based on the administration, the court majority emphasized that it would limit how deportation occurs, and that judicial review is necessary.
The detainee must “receive the notice after the date of this order that it will be removed under the law. Notices must provide a notice within a reasonable time, so that they can actually seek habeas and protection at the appropriate venue before such removal is made,” the majority wrote.
Lee Gererund, one of the lawyers representing immigrants, called it a major victory.
“The key point of this ruling is that the Supreme Court has stated that individuals must be given a legitimate process to challenge alien removal,” he said in a statement.
Still, Steve Vladeck, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, said the decision would make it difficult for immigrants to pose systemic challenges to what the Trump administration is doing.
“By relying on inevitable procedural techniques to enforce more individualized lawsuits, courts are effectively bringing peas into shootouts,” Vladeck wrote in Substack.
The administration gives the president “nearby authority” to detain and deport non-citizens from a country at war with the United States, but the appeals court said the invasion must come from foreign governments, not gangs. The law has been used only three times during the wars of 1812 and two world wars.
US District Judge James Boasberg found that alleged members of Tren de Aragua, also known as the TDA, deserved a hearing seeking an opportunity to deny that they belong to the gang, but argued that the administration should not be in the High Court in Boasberg.
Acting Attorney General Sarah Harris wrote that the case provides a clear choice between whether the president or the judiciary establishes a sensitive national security litigation policy.
“The Constitution provides a clear answer: President,” Harris wrote. “The Republic cannot afford to make another choice.”
She said the Supreme Court should at least limit Boasberg’s order to five immigrants who brought the challenge. Harris argued that immigrants could bring individual claims, but that only in Texas, where they are held, along narrower sites.
Twenty-seven Republican lawyers supported the administration and told the Supreme Court that “we have a welcome partner in the presidency who is willing to fight for the safety and security of Americans.”
But a group of conservative and former government officials, including former federal court of appeals judge Michael Ruttig and former CIA director Michael Hayden, said the question is whether the president or the judiciary has the final say on what Congress has given to the president under the alien enemy laws.
“Judicial review is inherent and balanced by the essential checks of framers set out in our constitutional system,” they said in an application led by the state’s Democracy Advocates Fund.
And immigration lawyers who launched an issue called the administration’s demands.
“The president’s efforts to advocate criminal gangs on the (alien enemy law) based on an aggression theory equal to immigration are in complete conflict that a limited delegation of wartime government authority chooses to give him through the law,” they wrote.
The temporary suspension of judges’ deportation was the only thing that would prevent immigrants from being sent to the infamous prison in El Salvador, and “probably never see them again,” they said.
And as the lawsuit continues, the suspension will not hurt the government, they said, as immigrants remain in government custody.
Boasberg was scheduled to hold a hearing on Tuesday about whether to extend the temporary suspension to a long-term interim injunction.
Contribution: Reuters
