CMEDIA: Hundreds of immigrants have been transferredto El Salvador by the US Trump administration despite federal judge’s orde to barring the deportations.
Deportations were barred under an 18th century wartime declaration targeting Venezuelan gang members, officials said Sunday.
Flights were in the air at the time of the ruling.
An order was issued Saturday evening by the U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg blocking the deportations but lawyers told him there were already two planes with migrants in the air — one headed for El Salvador, the other for Honduras.
Despite Boasberg’s verbal order of the planes be turned around, they apparently were not and he did not include the directive in his written order.
“Oopsie…Too late,” Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, a Trump ally who agreed to house about 300 migrants for a year at a cost of US$6 million in his country’s prisons, wrote on the social media site X above an article about Boasberg’s ruling. That post was recirculated by White House communications director Steven Cheung.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who negotiated an earlier deal with Bukele to house migrants, posted on the site: “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 deportation of the migrants was done after Trump’s declaration of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.
ACLU which filed the lawsuit led to Boasberg’s temporary restraining order on deportations, said it was asking the government whether the removals to El Salvador were in defiance of the court.
“This morning, 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,” ACLU’s lead lawyer, Lee Gelernt, said in a statement Sunday.
Video released by El Salvador’s government Sunday showed men with their hands and ankles shackled exiting airplanes into an airport tarmac as they struggled to walk as officers pushed their heads down to have them bend down at the waist.
The video also showed the men being transported to prison in a large convoy and were shown kneeling on the ground as their heads were shaved before they changed into the prison’s all-white uniform and placed in cells.
The deportations had been barred for up to 14 days and the migrants will remain in federal custody during that time. Boasberg has scheduled a hearing Friday to hear additional arguments in the case.
“Once they’re out of the country,” Boasberg said, “there’s little I could do.
