A federal judge in Texas ruled on Thursday that the Trump administration's recent deportations of Venezuelan immigrants were unlawful and blocked further deportations.
President Donald Trump deported the Venezuelan nationals to a maximum security prison in El Salvador in March. He invoked the Alien Enemies Act, an 18th-century law that allows for the deportation of citizens from foreign countries that are at war with the United States. The U.S. is not at war with Venezuela, but Trump danced around this by claiming that the gang Tren de Aragua was a sovereign nation that was invading the country.
In his ruling, U.S. District Court Judge Fernando Rodriguez said allowing Trump to widen the scope of the law would give the executive branch nearly limitless power.
"Allowing the President to unilaterally define the conditions when he may invoke the AEA, and then summarily declare that those conditions exist, would remove all limitations to the Executive Branch’s authority under the AEA, and would strip the courts of their traditional role of interpreting Congressional statutes to determine whether a government official has exceeded the statute’s scope," he wrote."The law does not support such a position."
The hasty deportation of immigrants without due process has led to a host of lawsuits against the Trump administration. Many judges have ruled against Trump's actions in part or otherwise barred the admin from carrying out further deportations. Rodriguez's ruling is the first one to find the deportations wholly unlawful.
Trump, for his part, has responded to checks on his power with calls to remove activist judges and taunts that the judiciary is "weak and ineffective."
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