Deportations to El Salvador: US court bans Trump's wartime deportations

The US government is temporarily prohibited from deporting foreign nationals to a prison in El Salvador. A court in Texas has halted the deportations, for which Trump is invoking an ancient law originally intended for other purposes.

Defeat for US President Donald Trump in court: The deportation of suspected foreign cartel members from the US based on a controversial 18th-century law of war is illegal, according to a federal judge. Judge Fernando Rodriguez in the US state of Texas ruled that the US government has no right to detain immigrants and deport them under the law.

This halts deportations for the time being. However, the Trump administration is likely to challenge the ruling. The judge was appointed to the position by Trump during his first term in office.

Since March, the US government has deported 288 Venezuelans to the notorious Cecot maximum-security prison in El Salvador, Central America, under the pretext that they were members of the Venezuelan criminal organization Tren de Aragua. The Venezuelan government denied this, and those affected had no recourse. The US pays millions of dollars to the increasingly autocratic El Salvador to detain the migrants. Trump recently publicly stated that he was considering having US citizens held in the foreign prison.

Law was intended for wartime

The Tren de Aragua is a Venezuelan gang involved in drug trafficking, extortion, and human trafficking. Trump declared the gang a foreign terrorist organization. He argues that Tren de Aragua is waging "irregular warfare" against US territory. To justify the deportations to prison, the Trump administration is citing a controversial and rarely used law from 1798: The Alien Enemies Act, which allows the president to detain and deport people without due process during times of war or invasion from "enemy nations." The law has only been used three times so far, primarily to intern Germans and Japanese during World War I and World War II.

The Trump administration's actions resulted in numerous lawsuits. Some deportations were suspended, and the U.S. Supreme Court also ruled that Trump could not continue deporting people under the War on Terrorism Act for the time being. However, the courts' decisions were not substantive in nature—they concerned technical issues.

This is what makes the Texas ruling so special. However, the case is likely to end up in a federal appeals court in New Orleans, Louisiana. It's one of the most conservative courts in the country. If the Trump administration appeals, it has a good chance of winning there.