The court submits the factual claims of the administrative department. Trump complicates this.
Governments often have advantages when defending their policies against legal challenges. Courts usually hand over the executive statements of facts and formal statements to formal statements about what happened and why, rather than exploring what actually happened.
But Trump’s second term has been fully open for months, coupled with his habit of selling twisted and thorough lies, has released a large number of lawsuits – a practice being tested.
Tensions have allowed the court to try to grasp the truth and stress that the president’s harsh manipulation of facts paved the way for the extent to which he actively strengthened his authority and supported his agenda, which has given them explicitly faced the obstacles the court faced.
The accused of dismissing a court order, by deporting hundreds of Venezuelan immigrants to El Salvador, the government opposed the judge’s authority to issue the order – partly because, the people said, were terrorists who invaded the United States on behalf of the Venezuelan government.
However, every element of the claim is subject to serious controversy – at least outside the court.
Government efforts to shape the factual landscape of legal and political struggles over deportation are part of a broader model. It has adopted a position that seems misleading or deceptive in other litigation.
For example, Mr. Trump himself publicly announced that billionaire Elon Musk led an agency violation initiative known as Doge, and the government has filed a court application to deny any contact. On the surface, others are formally their directors, and Mr. Musk is a White House adviser.
The government also insists that court orders to remove spending freezes in practice, and agencies keep blocking the money. Vulnerability? The political appointees of the institution are technically held by other legal authorities.
In an expulsion case, the heart of the government’s legal argument is that judges may think that the facts are nothing to do, because Mr. Trump can determine the reality.
The case centers on the Foreign Enemy Act, a 1798 law that allows citizens of hostile countries to be deported during the war. Mr Trump announced that he could use it to expel people who executive officials believe are members of a Venezuelan gang called Tren de Aragua without a personal immigration hearing.
On Saturday, Chief Justice of the District Court of Columbia, James E. Poasberg, the administration promptly asked the federal court of appeals to overturn the order while arguing that Mr. Trump’s various statements established legal truth.
“Determining whether there is an ‘invasion’ or ‘predatory invasion’, whether the organization has enough ties to foreign countries or governments, or whether it has been involved in national security interests to make the AEA involved, is fundamentally a political question and is what the president wants to answer,” it refers to the bill.
A White House spokeswoman pointed to Mr. Trump’s social media posts Tuesday, assaulting the Obama-appointed judge Judge Boothberg and calling for impeachment.
The Justice Department also urged the Court of Appeal to remove Judge Boasberg, while suggesting he could not trust him to protect confidential information. (His past as the presidency of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court means he has vast experience overseeing terrorism and espionage cases.) Attorney Pam Bondi accused him of supporting “terrorists who are safe in the United States.”
But is there any evidence to shelves that every Venezuelan who flew to El Salvador and was placed in a high-security prison is actually a member of the gang, a terrorist organization, or even true?
Last month, the State Department called Tren de Aragua, along with several other drug cartels, “foreign terrorist organizations”, complying with Mr. Trump’s earlier executive orders.
But this is a significant change in how the executive branch can use the powers conferred by Congress on terrorist organizations. In the past, such groups were mainly radical Islamists, as well as some branches of the Communist and Irish Republican Party.
By definition, terrorists are people who use criminal violence to further their ideological goals, trying to coerce policy changes.
Tren de Aragua is obviously a dangerous criminal organization, but by all appearances it is not inspired by any particular ideology as it pursues human smuggling, kidnapping and drug trafficking. Instead, its agenda appears to be making illegal profits.
The White House Press Office listed a series of crimes in an email, with members of Tren de Aragua being charged: “TDA members don’t seem to be like terrorists in New York City?
Ali Soufan, a former FBI agent who was the lead investigator against al-Qaeda during the September 11 terrorist attack, said the government should provide evidence that Tren de Aragua tried to influence the actions of the U.S. government before calling them terrorists.
“This is an evil organization that I have read about them, but we must be cautious about applying the allegations of ‘terrorism’ to legally suited actions, otherwise the term may lose its credibility and severity,” he said.
On Friday, before being transferred to El Salvador, Mr. Trump signed a declaration invoking the Alien Enemy Act against Tren de Aragua. He said he found the gang engaged in an invasion and “engage irregular wars” on the instructions of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s government.
“I discovered and declared” these factual decisions: “The full scope of this power is to carry out the diplomatic affairs of the state in accordance with the Constitution,” Mr. Trump said.
Mr. Trump did not disclose whether there was any intelligence community assessment of Tren de Aragua’s relationship with the Venezuelan government, and if so, whether it supports his factual discovery.
His most specific assertion is that the gang experienced significant growth from 2012 to 2017, when Tareck El Aissami served as governor of the Alaguya region and Mr. Maduro later appointed him as vice president.
The Justice Department filed in the Court of Appeal cited Mr. Trump’s “finition” because the court should evaluate the facts of the issue, including repeated observations of Mr. Aissami. It added: “The President can correctly find that given that the TDA has been significantly intertwined in the structure of the state structure of Venezuela, it is a fact of the Maduro regime.”
But both documents ignore a seemingly important fact: Mr. Isami is no longer part of Maduro’s government, which sued him for corruption. It was also not mentioned that Mr. Maduro and his assistants expressed hostility to Tren de Aragua.
At a hearing on Saturday, Judge Boothberg expressed doubts about the administration’s arguments, and then he directed the administration to stop any deportation under Trump’s order. He said he found a persuasive argument made by an ACLU attorney. Among them, the law applies only to hostile acts carried out by enemy states and is commensurate with war and has nothing to do with illegal immigration or “ancient state actors like criminal gangs.”
Judge Boasberg ordered the government not to remove him under the Foreign Enemy Act, verbally telling the Ministry of Justice that any aircraft had already spinned in the air. The written version of this order omits the language about the aircraft.
In the obvious that the plane that brought the Venezuelans to El Salvador did not turn around, the government seemed to be more than one argument as to why it should not be counted as a court order.
First, the government said that when the judge issued a written version of his order, the immigrant was already in international airspace, and he therefore lacked jurisdiction. It does not explain why this changes jurisdiction: These people are still detained in the U.S. while flying, with the judge’s orders targeting officials in charge of the operation.
But in a document Tuesday, the Justice Department made a different reason: the moment they left U.S. airspace, the people were “deleted.” An official also told the judge that a third plane leaving Texas after orders transported the man who suffered a final dismissal order, so they were not “completely expelled” under the 1798 bill.
The government also advised that Judge Boasberg had no legal right to intervene. The courts usually “have no jurisdiction over the president’s diplomatic actions, authorities under the Foreign Enemy Act, and his second core power to evacuate foreign terrorists from U.S. land and repel the declared invasion,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement,
The Justice Department briefly introduces the broad statement that the president has played the regime in terms of national security and diplomatic affairs and that the courts should not even review it.
Although judges and justices tend to respect the executive branch in such fields, the Supreme Court not only reviewed the president, but also ruled them.
The summary also cites cases from World War II, in which the Supreme Court said the Germans who were deported under the Foreign Enemy Act could not question his deportation in court. Nevertheless, the case arose in the declared war.
Mr. Trump’s lies and exaggerations also document his time as an exaggerated real estate developer, facilitating his project and himself. A judge said in his 2023 ruling on Mr. Trump that he had continued to commit fraud, creating a “fantasy world” in describing scale and valuing his buildings.
Later, he spread the lies that President Barack Obama was born in Kenya instead of Hawaii in the nation’s Republican politics.
During his first term, Mr. Trump made steady false claims about trivial and important things, both the size of his inauguration and the size of the 2020 election champion. The Washington Post counted 30,573 false or misleading claims during its first term.
Democratic advance Skye Perryman is helping to represent the plaintiffs, criticizing the factual premise of the government’s legal argument after a hearing before Judge Boasberg on Monday.
“The president is not a king, and every American should care about the illegal expansion of wartime efforts,” she said.
