ANOTHER court victory against the drumpf / trump-vance administration's attempts to impose their authoritarian theocratic oligarchy as dictated by the fascist heritage foundation's project 2025. Our constitution protects the civil liberties and human rights of EVERYONE in America, no matter one's status. Thank God the 5th Circuit Court court realizes that and is not intimidated by NOT MY pres drumpf / trump so they will actually rule in favor of the people and not the neo-nazi "christian" nationalist trying to destroy our beloved democratic Republic! This from the Washington Post.....
Federal appellate panel rejects Trump’s deportations under wartime law
The 2-1 decision from the panel, made up of judges from one of the nation’s most conservative appellate courts, follows a string of similar rulings from lower courts across the country.
A federal appellate court ruled Tuesday that President Donald Trump unlawfully invoked a centuries-old wartime law to swiftly deport Venezuelan migrants, blocking one of his administration’s most contentious immigration initiatives and teeing up a legal battle sure to end up before the Supreme Court.
A divided three-judge panel of the New Orleans-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit rejected Trump’s use of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to remove alleged members of the Venezuela-based Tren de Aragua gang, concluding that their presence in the country did not amount to the type of invasion or “predatory incursion” lawmakers envisioned when they drafted the statute allowing fast-tracked deportations.
The 2-1 decision from the panel, made up of judges from one of the nation’s most conservative appellate courts, follows a string of similar rulings from lower courts across the country that have almost uniformly rejected Trump’s invocation of the law on similar grounds. However, the case the 5th Circuit decided on Tuesday is widely viewed as the one most likely to reach the Supreme Court first, and several other appellate courts had paused their consideration of similar cases while awaiting the circuit court’s ruling.
Writing for the majority, Judge Leslie H. Southwick said Trump’s assertions that the Venezuelan government had encouraged Tren de Aragua members to immigrate to the United States illegally to traffic drugs and commit acts of violence did not amount to the type of military conflict that Congress envisioned when it drafted the law. The Alien Enemies Act has only been invoked three times before — during the War of 1812 and both World Wars.
“A country’s encouraging its residents and citizens to enter this country illegally is not the modern-day equivalent of sending an armed, organized force to occupy, to disrupt, or to otherwise harm the United States,” wrote Southwick, an appointee of President George W. Bush. He was joined in his opinion by Judge Irma Carrillo Ramirez, a Biden appointee.
In a scathing dissent, Judge Andrew S. Oldham criticized his colleagues for “second-guessing” the president. He argued that the ruling “contravenes over 200 years of legal precedent” and concluded that heads of state should be granted wide latitude to determine what justifies appropriate use of the law.
“For President Trump, however, the rules are different,” wrote Oldham, a Trump appointee. He added that the ruling threatens to turn federal judges into “robed crusaders who get to playact as multitudinous Commanders in Chief.”
Trump declared Tren de Aragua a foreign terrorist organization in January and two months later invoked the Alien Enemies Act to send 137 people whom the government accused of being members of the gang to a notorious prison in El Salvador.
The Trump administration’s claim that the gang is carrying out an “invasion” of the U.S. “at the direction” of the regime of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has since been questioned by U.S. intelligence agencies, while attorneys for several of the migrants targeted for removal have contested the government’s efforts to characterize them as gang members.
More than 250 of those deported migrants were released from El Salvador and returned to Venezuela in a deal announced in July.
Lee Gelernt, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney who argued the case on behalf of targeted Venezuelan migrants held at an immigration detention facility in North Texas, hailed the 5th Circuit’s decision Tuesday as a victory.
“The Trump administration’s attempt to use a wartime statute during peacetime for immigration purposes was correctly shut down by the court,” he said. “This ruling makes clear that the courts are there to keep the Executive branch within legal limits and that even the President cannot simply declare an emergency whenever it suits him.”
The Trump administration can either appeal Tuesday’s ruling to the 5th Circuit’s full bench or take its case directly to the Supreme Court, which already weighed in at an earlier stage in the case. In a statement Wednesday morning, the Department of Homeland Security vowed that the ruling would not “be the final say in this matter.”
“President Trump and Secretary [Kristi L.] Noem will not allow criminal gangs to terrorize American citizens,” the agency said in a statement. “Unelected judges are undermining the will of the American people.”
The Justice Department did not respond to requests for comment.
After the Supreme Court ruled in April that migrants targeted for removal under the Alien Enemies Act must challenge their removals in the court districts where they are being detained, immigration authorities rushed to transfer dozens of Venezuelans to the Bluebonnet Detention Facility in Anson, Texas, where only one federal judge is assigned to hear any such challenges.
That judge — James Wesley Hendrix, a Trump appointee who sits in the Northern District of Texas and is known for his conservative rulings — refused to temporarily pause the removals while the migrants’ legal challenges played out before him.
Just hours after his decision, dozens of Venezuelans housed at Bluebonnet were handed notices, written in English, telling them they had been designated as “alien enemies” and would be deported within days.
Fearing that the government was preparing to imminently deport the migrants before their cases could be heard, ACLU lawyers scrambled at three levels of the federal court system, asking Hendrix, the 5th Circuit and eventually the Supreme Court to intervene.
The Supreme Court did step in. In an extraordinary middle-of-the-night order, the justices temporarily barred Alien Enemies Act removals in Hendrix’s district while they considered whether the migrants had been granted enough time to challenge their removals.
Weeks later, the justices renewed that hold on deportations as they sent the case back to the 5th Circuit, setting up Tuesday’s ruling.
In addition to ordering the lower court to consider the legality of Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act, the justices also instructed the 5th Circuit to consider whether the minimum seven days’ notice that the government agreed to give targeted migrants gave them enough time to challenge their deportations in court. On that point, the appellate court panel provided the Trump administration a small victory on Tuesday.
The judges opted not to overturn that notice period, concluding they did not have enough evidence to determine it was insufficient. They sent the case back to Hendrix to hold hearings on whether more time was warranted.
Ramirez, partially dissenting from her colleagues, said she would have required the government to give migrants 21 days to file suit before they could be legally deported.
Marianne LeVine contributed to this report.
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