Trump blocked from using wartime law for deportations

Trump speaking to reporters on Friday

A federal judge has stopped US President Donald Trump from using a 227-year-old law meant to protect the US during wartime to carry out mass deportations of Venezuelans.

Trump proclaimed on Saturday that immigrants belonging to the Venezuelan crime gang Tren de Aragua were "conducting irregular warfare" against the US and that he would deport them under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.

But US District Judge James Boasberg that same evening ordered a halt to deportations covered by the proclamation lasting for 14 days, according to media reports.

Judge Boasberg told a hearing he had heard planes with deportees were taking off and ordered them turned back, the Washington Post reported.

The law allows the US to detain and remove people threatening the country's safety during wartime, without having to follow due process. It was last invoked to intern people of Japanese descent during World War Two.

There was little surprise over the proclamation on Saturday, where Trump declared that Tren de Aragua was "perpetrating, attempting, and threatening an invasion or predatory incursion against the territory of the United States".

He had promised to use the controversial law for mass deportations during last year's campaign.

Yván Gil Pinto, Venezuela's minister of foreign affairs, denounced the White House's decision to use the centuries-old measure.

The country "categorically and forcefully rejects the proclamation", Pinto said in a statement, "which infamously and unjustly criminalises Venezuelan migration".

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and other rights group had already sued to block him from using it on Saturday before he issued the proclamation.

At a hearing, the judge said the terms "invasion" and "predatory incursion" in the law "really relate to hostile acts perpetrated by enemy nations", and that the law probably did not offer a good basis for Trump's proclamation, according to the New York Times.

An ACLU lawyer had told the New York Times he believed there were two planes of Venezuelan immigrants in the air on Sunday. The BBC has not verified that report.

The case will now move through the legal system and could go all the way to the Supreme Court.

The proclamation, and the fight around it, should rally Trump's supporters, who largely returned him to the White House on his pledges to crack down on illegal immigration and bring down prices of everyday goods. Since he was inaugurated in January, he has swiftly worked to overhaul the US immigration system.

Rights groups, along with some legal experts, are calling the invocation unprecedented, noting the Alien Enemies Act has been used in the past after the US officially declared war against other countries. Under the constitution, only Congress can declare war.

All Venezuelan citizens in the US who are at least 14 years old, members of Tren de Aragua, and "are not actually naturalised or lawful permanent residents" were to be "apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed as Alien Enemies", under Trump's order.

Trump did not lay out how US officials would determine that a person is a member of the violent, transnational gang in the proclamation.

By using this law, instead of immigration laws that already give him "ample authority" to deport the gang's members, Trump would not have to prove that detainees are part of Tren de Aragua, Katherine Yon Ebright, counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice, said in a statement.

"He wants to bypass any need to provide evidence or to convince a judge that someone is actually a gang member before deporting them," she added.

"The only reason to invoke such a power is to try to enable sweeping detentions and deportations of Venezuelans based on their ancestry, not on any gang activity that could be proved in immigration proceedings."