President Donald Trump’s administration defied a federal court order on Saturday to halt deportations of migrants from the U.S. to El Salvador. It’s not the first time the Trump regime has ignored a court order but the scale and brazenness of the defiance really feels like a turning point for the country. And it’s unclear whether anything will stop Trump now that the country has reached such a lawless stage.
Trump secretly invoked the Alien Enemies Act on Friday, a law from 1798 that gives the president enormous power in a time of war to deport people without judicial review. The problem, of course, is that the U.S. isn’t at war. The president insists we are, but simply saying “we’re at war” because you don’t like immigrants in some abstract way isn’t how it’s done.
After Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act, the ACLU sued to stop the deportations, which were already in the process of happening on Saturday. Planes were in the air, and based on the publicly available information, at least some of the people being flown to El Salvador had not been handed over to that country yet when the judge issued his ruling.
Trump alleges most of the people deported this weekend were members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. But the fact that these people were deported under the Alien Enemies Act means they didn’t get a court hearing of any kind. There’s no way to even know their immigration status, aside from taking the Trump regime’s word for it. They could’ve been citizens for all we know.
One of the ACLU lawyers working on the case, Lee Gelernt, told MSNBC on Monday that he needs to get answers today to a lot of questions raised by the Trump regime’s apparent refusal to abide by the court. Gelernt says it doesn’t matter if the planes were over international waters, one of the arguments the Trump regime is apparently making about why it didn’t need to adhere to the order.
“The fact that they might have been in international territory makes no difference, because the U.S. had custody of these individuals, and the judge specifically ordered them to be returned,” Gelernt said.
El Salvador’s crypto-loving president Nayib Bukele tweeted about the court order early Sunday, sharing a screenshot of an article from the New York Post with a headline reading “Fed judge orders deportation flights carrying alleged Venezuelan gangbanger to return to US, blocks Trump from invoking Alien Enemies Act.” Bukele tweeted, “Ooopsi… Too late,” along with a crying-laughing emoji.
Bukele later shared that 238 alleged members of Tren de Aragua were sent from the U.S. to El Salvador, transferred to what he calls the CECOT, the Terrorism Confinement Center. Bukele says they’re being held there for a period of one year that can be renewed. An additional 23 alleged members of MS-13 were also transported there, according to the BBC. And the Salvadoran leader says the U.S. is paying for the country to take all these people to its notoriously brutal prison system.
“The United States will pay a very low fee for them, but a high one for us,” Bukele wrote Sunday. “Over time, these actions, combined with the production already being generated by more than 40,000 inmates engaged in various workshops and labor under the Zero Idleness program, will help make our prison system self-sustainable. As of today, it costs $200 million per year.”
There are other cases where the Trump administration appears to be defying court orders. Dr. Rasha Alawieh, a 34-year-old doctor, was reportedly detained Thursday at Boston Logan International Airport while flying into the U.S. from Lebanon. Alawieh reportedly held an H-1B visa working at Brown University’s medical school, according to CNN. And even though a court ordered she not be deported while the case was heard, the Trump regime apparently sent her back to Lebanon anyway.
Lawyers for Alawieh accused Trump’s Department of Justice of “willfully” disobeying the court order, as Slate notes, but the official story is that the DOJ did it unintentionally. There was supposed to be a hearing Monday about Alawieh’s case but it was canceled because lawyers representing her withdrew, though it’s not clear why. Trump has recently targeted law firms, stripping two firms of security clearances last week.
Trump has made no secret of his fascist intentions for the United States. The president spoke at the Department of Justice on Friday in a particularly unhinged, though not surprising, speech denouncing perceived enemies, referring to them as “scum.”
Trump at the DOJ: “There’s a guy named Norm Eisen. I don’t even know what he looks like. His name is Norm Eisen of CREW. He’s been after me for 9 years. Now CREW is a charitable organization. These are bad people … they’re scum.”
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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) March 14, 2025 at 1:10 PM
In a late-night post on Truth Social last night Trump declared that President Joe Biden’s pardons as he was leaving office were “void” because they were supposedly signed by auto-pen, a device often used by presidents of all political stripes to sign paperwork. It’s a ridiculous theory, but it’s the excuse Trump clearly wants to use to persecute people like former congresswoman Liz Cheney, a Republican who led a congressional investigation into his attempted self-coup on January 6, 2021.
The Trump regime is openly saying the law and the judges who interpret that law don’t matter anymore. Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, appeared on Fox News Monday to say he doesn’t care what the judges think. He’s just going to keep doing what he’s doing.
There are no guardrails anymore. If the U.S. government says you were a member of a violent gang, you have no way to contest that. That’s exactly why Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act. The courts slow down deportations if you have to actually prove someone is a danger to society. And being a member of a gang isn’t itself a crime in the U.S., even a historically violent one. People in the U.S. are supposed to be punished for committing acts of violence or, at the very least, for providing material support for those acts.
“Congress could not have been [more] clear in the statute that it has to be a foreign government or nation invading or in a declared war with the U.S.” Gelernt told MSNBC about the Alien Enemies Act. “Fundamentally, this is about separation of powers and the Trump administration thumbing their nose at Congress and the courts.”
A hearing is scheduled for 4 p.m. ET Monday. The ACLU is expected to bring up Bukele’s “oopsie” tweet, as well as a story published by Axios Sunday that quotes anonymous White House officials.
“It’s the showdown that was always going to happen between the two branches of government,” a senior White House official told Axios. “And it seemed that this was pretty clean. You have Venezuelan gang members … These are bad guys, as the president would say.”
And that gets to the heart of the problem. Trump is clearly starting with the people he believes will elicit little or no sympathy, even if they’re not actually gang members. Declaring them enemies is typically enough for Americans to believe they must be the bad guys.
Lindsay Toczylowski, an attorney for one of the people deported, wrote on Bluesky that her client was only singled out because he has tattoos and is not a member of a gang.
“Our client worked in the arts in Venezuela. He is LGBTQ. His tattoos are benign. But ICE submitted photos of his tattoos as evidence he is Tren de Aragua,” Toczylowski wrote. “His @ImmDef attorney planned to present evidence he is not. But never got the chance because our client has been disappeared.”
The Texas Department of Public Safety guide on how to spot gang tattoos certainly raises more questions than it answers.
Unfortunately, it seems like things will only get dumber and more fascist from here.
