President Donald Trump is invoking a 227-year-old law meant to protect the US during wartime in the hope of carrying out mass deportations of Venezuelans.
Trump has proclaimed that immigrants belonging to the Venezuelan crime gang Tren de Aragua, are “conducting irregular warfare” against the US, which gives him the right to deport them under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.
The law allows the US during wartime to detain and remove people threatening the country’s safety without having to follow due process. It was last invoked to intern people of Japanese descent during World War Two.
There is still a question of whether Trump can use the law this way, and rights groups are suing to block him.
There was little surprise to the proclamation on Saturday, where Trump declared Tren de Aragua was “perpetrating, attempting, and threatening an invasion or predatory incursion against the territory of the United States”.
He had promised to use the controversial law for mass deportations during last year’s campaign.
The American Civil Liberties Union and other rights group had already sued to block him from using it on Saturday before he issued the proclamation, as well.
A judge has issued a temporary restraint on the invocation and is expected to hear arguments soon.
Still, the invocation should rally Trump’s supporters, who largely returned him to the White House on his pledges to crack down on illegal immigration and bring down prices of every day goods. Since he was inaugurated in January, he has swiftly worked to overhaul the US immigration system.
Rights groups, along with some legal experts, are calling the invocation unprecedented, noting the Alien Enemies Act has been used in the past after the US officially declared war against other countries. Under the constitution, only Congress can declare war.
All Venezuelan citizens in the US who are at least 14 years old, members of Tren de Aragua and “are not actually naturalized or lawful permanent residents” are to be “apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed as Alien Enemies”, according to Trump’s proclamation.
Trump does not lay out in the proclamation how US officials will determine that a person is a member of the violent, transnational gang.
By using this law, instead of immigration laws that already give him “ample authority” to deport the gang’s members, Trump will not have to prove that detainees are part of Tren de Aragua, said Katherine Yon Ebright, counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice in a statement.
“He wants to bypass any need to provide evidence or to convince a judge that someone is actually a gang member before deporting them,” she said.
“The only reason to invoke such a power is to try to enable sweeping detentions and deportations of Venezuelans based on their ancestry, not on any gang activity that could be proved in immigration proceedings.”