Judge orders Trump administration to bring Venezuelans back from El Salvador prison
Backed by a Supreme Court order, a federal judge ruled on Wednesday that the Trump administration must bring back to the United States hundreds of suspected Venezuelan gang members who were sent to a mega prison in El Salvador without any court review of the criminal allegations against them.
U.S. District Judge James Boasberg in Washington, D.C., said the alleged members of the Tren de Aragua gang who were deported in mid-March under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act are entitled to filing habeas petitions to challenge the legal basis for their deportation and imprisonment in the notorious facility in El Salvador known as CECOT, the Spanish initials for the Terrorism Confinement Center.
Describing the Venezuelans’ ordeal as “Kafkaesque,” the judge noted that while the U.S. Supreme Court in April overturned his injunction stopping the removals of the suspected Venezuelan gang members, the justices ruled that the migrants have a due-process right to contest their detention on an individual basis in the United States.
“Perhaps the President lawfully invoked the Alien Enemies Act. Perhaps, moreover, [Trump and his administration] are correct that Plaintiffs [Venezuelan immigrants] are gang members,” Boasberg wrote in his 69-page order. “But — and this is the critical point — there is simply no way to know for sure, as the CECOT Plaintiffs never had any opportunity to challenge the Government’s say-so.
“Defendants [Trump administration] instead spirited away planeloads of people before any such challenge could be made,” Boasberg added. “And now, significant evidence has come to light indicating that many of those currently entombed in CECOT have no connection to the gang and thus languish in a foreign prison on flimsy, even frivolous, accusations.”
Boasberg’s rebuke of the Department of Homeland Security’s decision to invoke the archaic war powers law as grounds for summarily deporting the suspected Venezuelan gang members followed a major ruling by the Supreme Court in April.
The court vacated the judge’s temporary restraining order that had blocked the removal of alleged Venezuelan gang members, giving the Trump administration the green light to use the wartime law to carry out the deportations of certain migrants.
The majority ruled that challenges to the detention and removal of migrants using the Alien Enemies Act must be brought as legal petitions in the area where the plaintiffs were held in the United States, not in Washington, D.C., where the American Civil Liberties Union filed its petition.
But the majority also found that such migrants are entitled to due process of the law as part of their removal proceedings. The plaintiffs who brought the lawsuit in question said they had been wrongly accused of being members of the violent Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.
Alien Enemies Act detainees “must receive notice after the date of this order that they are subject to removal under the act,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote. “The notice must be afforded within a reasonable time and in such a manner as will allow them to actually seek habeas relief in the proper venue before such removal occurs.”
The high court opinion came just as the judge who issued the temporary restraining order was mulling whether to hold Trump administration officials in contempt for violating his order to pause the flights of Venezuelan migrants to the mega prison in El Salvador that began in March.
Boasberg originally imposed a 14-day temporary restraining order halting the deportations of alleged members of Tren de Aragua.
In a concurring opinion, Justice Brett Kavanaugh said that all nine members of the Supreme Court agree that judicial review is available to migrants. “The only question is where that judicial review should occur,” Kavanaugh wrote.
Among the immigrants sent to the prison in El Salvador was a Maryland man. In a related legal dispute, the Trump administration admitted that Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran native, was deported there due to an “administrative error” — despite an immigration court order that he not be removed from the United States.
Another federal judge ordered the Trump administration to bring him back to the U.S. The Supreme Court affirmed the judge’s order directing the Trump administration to “facilitate” Garcia’s release, but he’s still imprisoned in El Salvador.
This story was originally published June 4, 2025 at 7:09 PM.
