The US deported more than 250 mainly Venezuelan alleged gang members to El Salvador despite a US judge’s ruling to halt the flights on Saturday after Donald Trump controversially invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a 1798 law meant only to be used in wartime.
El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, said 238 members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua and 23 members of the Salvadoran gang MS-13 had arrived and were in custody as part of a deal under which the US will pay the Central American country to hold them in its 40,000-person capacity “terrorism confinement centre”.
The confirmation came hours after a US federal judge expanded his ruling temporarily blocking the Trump administration from invoking the Alien Enemies Act, a wartime authority that allows the president broad leeway on policy and executive action to speed up mass deportations.
The White House said the judge had no authority to block the deportation.
“A single judge in a single city cannot direct the movements of an aircraft ... full of foreign alien terrorists who were physically expelled from US soil,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement.
She said the court had “no lawful basis”.
The US district judge James Boasberg had attempted to halt the deportations for all individuals deemed eligible for removal under Trump’s proclamation, which was issued on Friday. Boasberg also ordered deportation flights already in the air to return to the US.
“Oopsie … Too late,” Bukele posted online, followed by a laughing emoji.
Soon after Bukele’s statement, the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, thanked El Salvador’s leader.
“Thank you for your assistance and friendship, President Bukele,” he wrote on the social media site X, following up on an earlier post in which he said the US had sent “2 dangerous top MS-13 leaders plus 21 of its most wanted back to face justice in El Salvador”.
Rubio added that “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”.
On Friday, Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act to order the deportations of suspected members of the Venezuelan gang he has accused of “unlawfully infiltrating” the US. The US formally designated Tren de Aragua a “foreign terrorist organization” last month.
He claimed the gang members were “conducting irregular warfare and undertaking hostile actions” against the US.
The Alien Enemies Act has only ever been used three times before, most recently during the second world war, when it was used to incarcerate Germans and Italians as well as for the mass internment of Japanese-American civilians.
It was originally passed by Congress in preparation for what the US believed would be an impending war with France. It was also used during the war of 1812 and during the first world war.
The US attorney general, Pam Bondi, slammed Judge Boasberg’s stay on deportations. “This order disregards well-established authority regarding President Trump’s power, and it puts the public and law enforcement at risk,” Bondi said in a statement on Saturday night.
But lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union contend that the Trump does not have the authority to use the law against a criminal gang, rather than a recognized state.
after newsletter promotion
Patrick Eddington, a homeland security and civil liberties legal expert at the libertarian Cato Institute, said that whatever it might say, the White House was in “open defiance” of the judge.
“This is beyond the pale and certainly unprecedented,” Eddington said, calling it the most radical test of America’s system of checks and balances since the civil war.
On Sunday, the Republican senator Mike Rounds questioned whether the deportation flights had ignored Judge Boasberg’s order to turn around. “We’ll find out whether or not that actually occurred or not,” Rounds told CNN. “I don’t know about the timing on it. I do know that we will follow the law.”
El Salvador’s multimillion-dollar “terrorism confinement centre” – which is known by its Spanish acronym Cecot – is the centerpiece of Bukele’s highly controversial anti-gang crackdown which has seen tens of thousands of people jailed since it was launched in March 2022.
The 40,000-capacity “mega-prison” was opened at the start of 2023 and has since become an essential destination for rightwing Latin American populists keen to burnish their crime-fighting credentials with voters. “This is the way. Tough on crime,” Argentina’s hardline security minister, Patricia Bullrich, enthused last year after posing outside Cecot’s packed cells.
A succession of social media influencers and foreign journalists have also been invited to tour the prison to document its harsh conditions and help Bukele promote his clampdown, which has helped dramatically reduce El Salvador’s once sky-high murder rate.
“The conditions in there are like something you’ve never seen … Depending on which side of the argument you fall on, it’s either the ultimate deterrent or it’s an abuse of human rights,” the Australian TV journalist Liam Bartlett reported after visiting El Salvador’s “hellhole” prison recently.
“There’s no sheets [and] no mattresses. [Prisoners] sleep on cold steel frames and they eat the same meal every single day. Utensils are banned so they use their hands [to eat]. There’s just two open toilets in each of these massive cells and the lights stay on 24/7,” Bartlett added. “Imagine how long you would last in these conditions.”
Human rights activists have decried how the mass imprisonments have taken place largely without legal process. More than 100 prisoners have died behind bars since Bukele’s clampdown began.
Neither the US nor El Salvador offered any immediate evidence that the scores of Venezuelan prisoners sent to Cecot this weekend were in fact gang members or had been convicted of any offense.