Over a weekend when President Donald Trump secretly invoked the centuries-old Alien Enemies Act to speed up some deportations and a federal judge abruptly stopped him from doing so, Trump administration officials claim they sent more than 200 suspected gang members to a new mega-prison in El Salvador.
The Trump administration has yet to identify the people who were deported, the conditions of their deportation and what role, if any, the wartime act played.
Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele said Sunday that his country now has custody of 238 members of the transnational Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua and more than 20 members of the Salvadoran MS-13 gang. He released a three-minute video that showed the alleged gang members escorted off three planes by heavily armed men wearing camouflage as dramatic music played. The men were loaded onto buses and taken to the mega-prison, where their heads were shaved.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio posted on X: “Thank you for your assistance and friendship, President Bukele.” Trump later reposted the video on social media and thanked the Salvadoran leader for his “understanding of this horrible situation.”
Earlier Sunday, Bukele responded to a social media post about the judge in Washington, D.C., halting the use of the act on Saturday and wrote: “Oopsie, too late,” followed by a laughing emoji. Rubio reposted it, and a White House spokesman responded with a meme saying, “Boom!”
The series of extraordinary events alarmed immigration experts, legal scholars and others. Trump signed a proclamation Friday to deploy the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 for the first time since World War II, when it paved the way for the internment of more than 110,000 Japanese Americans. In exercising this wartime power, Trump called for the swift removal of Venezuelans allegedly involved in Tren de Aragua, stripping them of their right to an immigration court hearing. The act has been used only three times before to bar citizens of hostile enemy governments from the United States, and only during a declared war. The White House made the proclamation public Saturday afternoon after advocates for immigrants sued.
Nobody in the administration — not the White House, the State Department, Homeland Security nor Immigration and Customs Enforcement — would say Sunday whether the immigrants were deported to El Salvador under the proclamation or if the government defied a federal judge’s order to turn the planes around. A spokeswoman for the El Salvador government referred to the president’s statements.
The Justice Department has said that most, if not all, were serious criminals, but they did not release their names to publicly so that claim could be independently verified. Some of the gang members deported were members of the MS-13 gang tied to El Salvador, and the proclamation Friday does not appear to include them.
The high-profile actions make it clear that the administration will deploy force and fright to remove immigrants from the United States, even if they have to devise extraordinary new ways to do it, such as sending them to a country that is not their home country and putting them in jail. The White House’s online mocking of the judicial order by the chief federal judge in Washington added to the concern among advocates that Trump’s determination to carry out the largest mass deportation campaign in U.S. history would sidestep legal and humanitarian norms.
American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Lee Gelernt, who successfully argued for the temporary restraining order Saturday at a remote hearing before U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, said Sunday that the administration may have subverted the law if it expelled immigrants before alerting the public to Trump’s proclamation.
“The administration was legally required to publish the Proclamation before starting to use it but it appears the administration wanted a head start before any lawsuit could be filed,” Gelernt said in a statement. “We have asked the government this morning if they intend to assure the Court that nobody was removed under the Proclamation after the Court’s order.”
Michael Kozak, a top State Department official, said in a court filing Sunday that high-ranking U.S. officials — including Rubio — had been engaged in “intensive and delicate negotiations” in recent weeks with El Salvador and Venezuela to deport Tren de Aragua gang members. Officials had recently reached an agreement to deport them, he wrote.
Kozak, the senior official overseeing diplomatic relations in the Western Hemisphere, said Boasberg’s ruling halting the removals would harm U.S. foreign policy. The White House and State led the negotiations, which also included U.S. Special Envoy for Latin America Mauricio Claver-Carone, and Special Presidential Envoy Richard Grenell, he wrote.
The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, which will hear the Trump administration’s request to stay Boasberg’s orders, set a Tuesday deadline for the migrants’ lawyers to respond. The government has until Wednesday to file a rebuttal. The three-judge panel hearing the appeal consists of Judge Karen LeCraft Henderson, a Ronald Reagan appointee, Patricia Millett, a Barack Obama appointee, and Justin Walker, a Trump appointee. Walker was on a 2022 panel that rejected GOP efforts to keep in place a Trump policy that allowed the government to summarily expel asylum seekers and others at U.S. borders.
The decision to transport the alleged gang members to El Salvador also reignited questions about human rights violations in that country’s prison system. After years of high gang-related crime, Bukele declared an emergency in March 2022, temporarily suspending basic rights and ordering the arrests of thousands of gang members he labeled terrorists and putting them in high-security prisons. Violent crime and mass migration plunged, but human rights groups said the prisons are inhumane.
Bukele in February agreed to jail criminals the U.S. government cannot deport because of strained diplomatic relations with countries such as Venezuela, though El Salvador even offered to jail U.S. citizen offenders.
Bukele said Sunday that the deportees were immediately transferred to the Terrorism Confinement Center, a new mega-prison built for 20,000 detainees that Bukele has said could hold double that capacity. He said that the inmates would perform forced labor for at least a year, possibly more, and that the “United States will pay a very low fee for them.”
Rubio did not say how much the U.S. is paying, and State Department officials did not immediately respond to questions Sunday.
Human Rights Watch has documented torture, forced disappearances and a lack of legal recourse in Salvadoran prisons, as well as poor access to food and water. The organization has reported instances in which inmates are systematically beaten and forced to confess that they are members of gangs, according to Juan Pappier, Americas deputy director for the group.
Pappier said that El Salvador is offering to become “a Central American version of Guantánamo” and that securing a release from the prison system is “extremely hard.”
“If they are taken to a court hearing it will be a virtual court hearing with hundreds of detainees at the same time,” Pappier added. “It will be almost impossible for them to be released. There is absolutely no way to communicate with them.”
While the Bukele government has invited social media influencers and some journalists to tour the prison, little is known about the conditions for inmates inside, said Carlos García, a journalist and researcher who specializes in the MS-13 gang.
The mega-prison opened in early 2023 after being built in record time, García said, and he was not aware of any inmates who have been released from the prison since then and who have given public interviews about the conditions inside. “It was built like a concentration camp,” García said. “There is no recreational area, no yards outside. The inmates only receive sunlight through small windows.”
The return of MS-13 leaders to El Salvador also raised questions about whether some of them had been involved in a pact between the Bukele administration and the gang. Their return to El Salvador could “make it impossible for them to tell the truth about what they negotiated with the president of El Salvador,” Pappier said.
Some MS-13 leaders were released from prison by Bukele officials, arrested in Mexico and extradited to the United States. An indictment in New York mentions an alleged agreement with the Bukele government, in which the leaders were given prison benefits and guarantees that they wouldn’t be extradited to the United States by the Bukele administration.
Dan Diamond contributed to this report.
