Many of the migrants’ lawyers and family members say they were not gang members and had no chance to dispute the government’s assertion that they were.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
But White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, without directly addressing the Supreme Court ruling, said in a post on X: “We live in a society where foreign alien terrorists have unlimited free legal representation. But Americans whose communities have been stolen from them are left without recourse. We are rebalancing the scales.”
The high court majority issued Saturday’s stay after American Civil Liberties Union lawyers filed urgent requests for immediate action in multiple courts, including the Supreme Court, after reporting that some of the men already had been loaded aboard buses and were told they were to be deported.
The ACLU said the administration was poised to deport the men using a 1798 law that historically has been employed only in wartime without affording them a realistic opportunity to contest their removal – as the Supreme Court had ordered.
“These men were in imminent danger of spending their lives in a horrific foreign prison without ever having had a chance to go to court. We are relieved that the Supreme Court has not permitted the administration to whisk them away the way others were just last month,” Lee Gelernt, the ACLU’s lead attorney in the case, said in a statement on Saturday.
In an audio recording posted on TikTok, several men said they were Venezuelans falsely accused of being gang members and held at Bluebonnet immigration detention centre in Texas. They said they were taken to a regional airport late on Friday but then returned.
The recording has not been verified by Reuters. An earlier post on TikTok from the same account was cited in court filings on Friday.
More than 50 Venezuelans had been scheduled to be flown out of the country — presumably to El Salvador — from the immigration centre, the New York Times cited two people with knowledge of the situation as saying.
Van Hollen said that when he and Abrego Garcia first sat down for a meeting at the hotel, they “just had glasses of water on the table, maybe some coffee”.Credit: X / @ChrisVanHollen
Elected last year on a promise to crack down on migrants, Trump invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act in a bid to swiftly deport accused members of Tren de Aragua, a criminal gang originating from Venezuelan prisons that his administration labels a terrorist group.
Trump and his senior aides have asserted their executive power grants them wide authority on immigration matters, testing the balance of power between branches of government.
Reuters
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