The Trump administration transferred hundreds of immigrants to El Salvador despite a federal judge’s order temporarily barring the deportations targeting Venezuelan gang members under an 18th century wartime declaration. Flights were in the air at the time of the ruling, reports the Associated Press. U.S. District Judge James Boasberg issued an order Saturday evening blocking the deportations as lawyers told him there were already two planes with migrants in the air — one headed for El Salvador, the other for Honduras. Boasberg verbally ordered the planes be turned around, but they apparently were not. “Oopsie…Too late,” said Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, a Trump ally who agreed to house about 300 migrants for a year at a cost of $6 million in his country’s prisons.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who negotiated an earlier deal with Bukele to house migrants, posted on X, “We sent over 250 alien enemy members of Tren de Aragua which El Salvador has agreed to hold in their very good jails at a fair price that will also save our taxpayer dollars.” The migrants were deported under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act. The law, invoked during World Wars I and II and the War of 1812, requires a president to declare the U.S. is at war, giving him extraordinary powers to detain or remove foreigners who otherwise would have protections under immigration or criminal laws. It was last used to justify the detention of Japanese-American civilians during World War II. The American Civil Liberties Union, which filed the lawsuit that led to Boasberg’s temporary restraining order on deportations, said Sunday, "We asked the government to assure the Court that its order was not violated and are waiting to hear, as well as trying to do our own investigation." Venezuela’s government rejected the use the law, characterizing it as evocative of “the darkest episodes in human history, from slavery to the horror of the Nazi concentration camps.”