After Judge Blocks Alien Enemies Act, White House Claims Nearly 300 Already Deported (Video)

By Maria Sacchetti, Marianne LeVine and Tobi Raji

A federal judge barred President Donald Trump on Saturday from using a wartime powers act to deport alleged Venezuelan gang members without a hearing, ordering the administration to turn around any planes that had already taken off after the Alien Enemies Act quietly went into effect.

Trump signed a proclamation Friday to deploy the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 for the first time since World War II to swiftly remove Venezuelans allegedly involved in the transnational gang known as Tren de Aragua. The act has been used only three times before to bar citizens of hostile enemy governments from the United States, and only during a declared war. The White House kept the proclamation under wraps until after advocates for immigrants sued Saturday, fearing he was already sweeping immigrants out of the country.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed immigration officials had “arrested nearly 300 Tren de Aragua terrorists” over the weekend and sent them to El Salvador. The country’s president, Nayib Bukele, said that 238 members of the transnational Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua and 23 members of the Salvadoran MS-13 gang had already arrived in El Salvador and were in his custody, with a social media post responding to the judge’s ruling that said “Oopsie, too late,” followed by a laughing emoji.

A White House official celebrated his post with a meme, saying, “Boom!”

Bukele shared video showing the prisoners arriving at the airport, surrounded by heavily armed, camouflage-clad men. Bukele said they were taken to a “Terrorism Confinement Center,” where the video showed that masked officers then forced the men to their knees, shaved their heads and marched them in white shirts and shorts into a cell block. Bukele said the inmates would go into forced labor for at least a year, possibly more, and that the “United States will pay a very low fee for them.”

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