Donald Trump is calling on the Supreme Court to allow his administration to resume removing immigrants from the United States under the Alien Enemies Act, a centuries-old wartime law invoked for the fourth time in U.S. history to target Venezuelans.
“This case presents fundamental questions about who decides how to conduct sensitive national-security-related operations in this country,” according to the administration’s filing with the nation’s highest court on Friday.
“The Constitution supplies a clear answer: the President. The republic cannot afford a different choice,” the petition states.
The request follows a federal appeals court’s rejection of the president’s attempt to throw out a lower-court ruling that is temporarily blocking the administration from deporting immigrants under the law.
Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act earlier this month as three planes with dozens of Venezuelans were sent to a notorious prison in El Salvador, where they do not have access to legal counsel and face the prospect of indefinite detention.
The flights were in the air on March 15 when District Judge James Boasberg ordered the administration to turn the planes around. He has pressed officials to answer a series of questions about the operation to determine whether they intentionally defied his court orders.
Trump’s order states that “all Venezuelan citizens 14 years of age or older who are members of [Tren de Aragua], are within the United States, and are not actually naturalized or lawful permanent residents of the United States are liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed as Alien Enemies.”
Wednesday’s 2-1 decision — written by appellate Judge Karen Henderson, who was appointed by George H.W. Bush — states that the Alien Enemies Act gives the president “near-blanket authority to detain and deport any noncitizen whose affiliation traces to the belligerent state.”
But a “central limit to this power is the act’s conditional clause — that the United States be at war or under invasion or predatory incursion,” states Henderson’s ruling.
Trump “plucks the third-order usage” of the word “invasion” to justify summary deportations, she wrote.
Immigration alone also does not constitute a “predatory incursion,” the ruling states.
The phrase refers to a “form of hostilities against the United States by another nation-state, a form of attack short of war,” according to Henderson. “Migration alone did not suffice.”
The “government argues that we may not even assess the lawfulness of its conduct,” Henderson adds. “In its view, whether there is an invasion or predatory incursion — or whether an organization qualifies as a foreign nation or government — is a political question unreviewable by the courts.”
In a concurring opinion, Barack Obama-appointed appellate Judge Patricia Millett rebuked the government’s argument that immigrants, on allegations alone, “can be removed immediately with no notice, no hearing, no opportunity — zero process — to show that they are not members of the gang, to contest their eligibility for removal under the law, or to invoke legal protections against being sent to a place where it appears likely they will be tortured and their lives endangered.”
The “Constitution’s demand of due process cannot be so easily thrown aside,” she wrote.
This is a developing story
Source: independent.co.uk