The News
US President Donald Trump invoked a 1798 law to deport more than 250 Venezuelans to El Salvador despite a court order blocking the removals. It represents the latest front in a looming showdown between the executive and judiciary: Judges have slowed or blocked several Trump initiatives, and the president’s supporters have labeled such moves a “judicial power grab.”
A White House spokesperson said the 18th-century law, which has only ever been used during wartime, confers broad executive powers and that the courts have “no jurisdiction” over Trump’s foreign policy.
Another Trump official told The Washington Post that the judge’s ruling came too late for the planes to be turned around. The administration has filed to appeal the ruling.
SIGNALS
A showdown between the executive and judiciary looms
The fight over the 1798 law represents the latest front in the showdown between the US executive and the judiciary. Numerous federal judges have sought to slow or block several of Trump’s key initiatives and there are scores of lawsuits moving through courts — while many of these cases are likely to resolve in front of the country’s conservative Supreme Court, judges themselves are increasingly being targeted by the administration and its allies: “Trump’s aggressive assertions of presidential power, and the speed with which he has imposed his agenda, have put judges on the hot seat,” The Wall Street Journal wrote. “The judiciary faces a choice between capitulating to Trump (at least on some issues) or risking a constitutional crisis,” one legal scholar argued.
Trump looks to ramp up deportations
US President Donald Trump’s immigration stance has already succeeded in driving down border crossings, Axios reported: In February, crossings at the US southern border fell to their lowest level since at least 2000. But other data shows that the Trump administration has deported far fewer people during his first month in office than did his predecessor, Joe Biden. The latest removals could mark “the beginning of a larger effort to use the Alien Enemies Act” by Trump to speed up migrant deportations, The New York Times wrote: The 1789 law — last invoked during World War II to target people of German, Italian, and Japanese heritage — enables the administration to deport people more rapidly in order to quell an “invasion or predatory incursion” by an enemy state.