Mark this day well. This is a day when the sitting *president* of this country has seen fit to ignore the rule of law by overtly doing what he wants to as opposed to what a federal judge has ordered be done. And if that isn’t bad enough, Steven Cheung, Trump’s former campaign manager and now his communications director, has taken to social media to boast about this illegal and defiant act. This is where we have descended folks, and it’s less than sixty days into this Administration From Hell. Beware the Ides of March, indeed.
The Trump administration has transferred hundreds of immigrants to El Salvador even as a federal judge issued an order temporarily barring the deportations under an 18th century wartime declaration targeting Venezuelan gang members, officials said Sunday. Flights were in the air at the time of the ruling.
U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg issued an order Saturday blocking the deportations but lawyers told him there were already two planes with immigrants in the air — one headed for El Salvador, the other for Honduras. Boasberg verbally ordered the planes be turned around, but they apparently were not and he did not include the directive in his written order.
“Oopsie…Too late,” Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, a Trump ally who agreed to house about 300 immigrants for a year at a cost of $6 million in his country’s prisons, wrote on the social media site X above an article about Boasberg’s ruling. That post was recirculated by White House communications director Steven Cheung.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who negotiated an earlier deal with Bukele to house immigrants, posted on the site: “We sent over 250 alien enemy members of Tren de Aragua which El Salvador has agreed to hold in their very good jails at a fair price that will also save our taxpayer dollars.”
Maybe it will save the taxpayers and maybe it won’t. The transportation for the deportees isn’t cheap and it’s not intended to be. Spectacle is the order of the day. But it’s interesting that Rubio’s kneejerk defense of this deplorable situation is an economic one. Oh, now it doesn’t matter if the Trump administration breaks the law and defies court orders, as long as there’s some kind of a financial rationale?
Steve Vladeck, a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, said that Boasberg’s verbal directive to turn around the planes was not technically part of his final order but that the Trump administration clearly violated the “spirit” of it.
“This just incentivizes future courts to be hyper specific in their orders and not give the government any wiggle room,” Vladeck said.
The immigrants were deported after Trump’s declaration of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which has been used only three times in U.S. history.
The law, invoked during World Wars I and II and the War of 1812, requires a president to declare the United States is at war, giving him extraordinary powers to detain or remove foreigners who otherwise would have protections under immigration or criminal laws. It was last used to justify the detention of Japanese-American civilians during World War II. […]
Venezuela’s government in a statement Sunday rejected the use of Trump’s declaration of the law, characterizing it as evocative of “the darkest episodes in human history, from slavery to the horror of the Nazi concentration camps.” […]
The Trump administration has not identified the immigrants deported, provided any evidence they are in fact members of Tren de Aragua [group that Trump claims is “invading” the United States] or that they committed any crimes in the U.S,. It did also send two top members of the Salvadoran MS-13 gang to El Salvador who had been arrested in the United States.
Whether they were members of Tren de Aragua is immaterial. The *crime* they committed was being in the wrong place at the wrong time in Trump’s America. “Basically any Venezuelan citizen in the US may be removed on pretext of belonging to Tren de Aragua, with no chance at defense,” Adam Isacson of the Washington Office for Latin America, a human rights group, warned on X.
Make no mistake, it’s not what you do, it’s what you look like, how you sound, and whether you fit into Trump’s script in the role of the dangerous, illegal foreigner. Those are the only elements Trump is interested in proving, not the elements of a crime. Meanwhile, Justice Boasberg has “noted that the law has never before been used outside of a congressionally-declared war and that plaintiffs may successfully argue Trump exceeded his legal authority in invoking it.”
Or, Trump might just declare war on Venezuala. That’ll work. Or offer them the chance to become our 51st state. Or nuke them. In this day and age, nothing you can imagine is too insane for it to be beyond the scope of the people now in power.
How is this prediction going so far?
— Ron Filipkowski (@ronfilipkowski.bsky.social) 2025-03-16T21:01:06.564Z
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Baby steps, little baby steps, one at a time.
Towards dictatorship.
Trump has announced he’s going to sue big law firms. Then there’s this. And the other day he was at the DOJ calling people there “scum” and “lunatics.” It’s all part of a larger pattern.
For what? Donnie, Donnie, Donnie you have to have grounds to.sue. If the law firm hasn’t done any harm, you can’t sue them.because you don’t have standing. And I think.even Bimbo.Blondi knows the government can’t sue a law firm or charge them.without their committing a crime.
“done you any harm”
Wonder who found me a negative. Guess it’s a Trump.troll.
I suspect this will escalate all the way up to the SCOTUS, and if mango mussolini defies them, he’ll trigger a constitutional crisis and could be removed forcefully by the military. Now that would be satisfying to watch.
How is that process activated? Surely not Hegseth. The generals take over? And then…….. Lotsof so not nice world examples
Depends on whether eco OTUS cares about their legacy. Most partisan court ever isn’t gonna look.book.in the history and lae books
They’re going to blow off the courts and that is our last defense. Robert’s court will bow due to maggats threatening them.
We need to get ready. They are already trying to kill us.
Maybe if something might happen to marlardo that would occupy his time.
I can only shake my head at you lefties. You’re upset because some gang banger scumbags got deported. Boo hoo. I know I know, you’ll claim that ice ignored a court order but hey, the planes were already in the air so tough shit, the real story here is democrats defending criminals. How shameful!!