U.S. District Judge James Boasberg ordered the Trump administration on Thursday to “facilitate” the return of as many as 137 Venezuelans who were deported last year to a notorious prison in El Salvador against his orders. Boasberg said they should receive the chance to legally challenge their removal.
It was the latest loss in court for the administration over its decision to summarily send more than a hundred Venezuelans to the CECOT detention facility, which Boasberg previously found unlawful. Several detainees later reported being tortured at the megaprison.
Although most have been already released by El Salvador back to Venezuela as part of a diplomatic side deal, their fate remains uncertain. But they have not been able to legally challenge the way they were deported.
“It is worth emphasizing that this situation would never have arisen had the government simply afforded plaintiffs their constitutional rights before initially deporting them,” wrote Boasberg, chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
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He gave the Justice Department until March 13 to file documents “explaining how and when it will transport” these people, but he directed the government to “offer a boarding letter” to any of those who request “commercial air travel to the United States.”
It’s unclear how many of them would jump at the opportunity, given the expectation that the government would jail them once again when they arrive, the judge said.
President Donald Trump quietly invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, a wartime measure that has rarely been utilized in the past two centuries, last year to brand hundreds of Venezuelan migrants present in the United States as foreign “enemies.” The administration used that law to rapidly deport Venezuelans to CECOT last March, not offering them a chance to challenge their removal.
Boasberg ordered Immigration and Customs Enforcement at the time to turn the planes around, but officials ignored the order. It took months of fighting in court for Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to finally say she was behind the decision to disregard legal intervention by the courts.
The Supreme Court has echoed Boasberg’s deep concerns over the denial of due process, and the case has become emblematic of the high-stakes fight for the judiciary to keep the executive branch in check.
Boasberg made a passing reference to that ongoing battle in his order, pointing out that he’d “offered the government the opportunity to propose steps that would facilitate hearings” with the deported Venezuelans, but “apparently not interested in participating in this process, the government’s responses essentially told the Court to pound sand.”
Boasberg referenced the ongoing power struggle with the federal government by pointing to its treatment of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran man who was improperly sent to CECOT, noting that the Supreme Court upheld an order directing the government to “facilitate and effectuate” his return but still met stiff resistance from top Trump administration officials for months.
Boasberg stressed the importance of holding the administration accountable before it normalizes unlawful deportations.
“In other words, it is up to the government to remedy the wrong that it perpetrated here and to
provide a means for doing so,” he wrote. “Were it otherwise, the government could simply remove people from the United States without providing any process and then, once they were in a foreign country, deny them any right to return for a hearing or opportunity to present their case from abroad.”
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