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Trump Chooses Venezuelan Gang Members To Defy Rule Of Law [1]
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Date: 2025-03-17
It’s time to address an emerging Constitutional crisis as the Trump Regime has challenged the very essence of the rule of law. I refer to the flights of hundreds of alleged members of a Venezuelan gang (TdA) to a brutal El Salvador prison. As a starting point, these people were not a threat to public safety because they were already incarcerated in the United States, so don’t fall for that red herring.
Trump invoked the “Alien Enemies Act,” a 1798 law only previously used in times of declared war. You can read it HERE.
This statute has only been used in times of war because that is obviously what it is intended for. In relevant part it allows the deportation of foreign aliens from a particular hostile nation when:
“there is a declared war between the United States and any foreign nation or government, or any invasion or predatory incursion is perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of the United States by any foreign nation or government”
The Trump regime claims TfA’s criminal activities constitute an “invasion” of the United States. As a starting point anyone who thinks the original intent of “invasion” in that 1798 statute referred to criminal gang activity is deluding themselves. It’s like claiming Italy “invaded” the United States with the mafia.
A second problem is that even granting the absurdity that criminal gang activity is an “invasion” as that word might mean under this 1798 statute, the invasion must be “by” a “foreign nation or government.” TfA is not Venezuela and is not any kind of agent of the Venezuelan government.
The justification of the deportations under this statute is clearly specious. The words simply do not support it.
Unsurprisingly a judge ruled precisely to that effect. Last Thursday five imprisoned individuals sued fearing they would be treated as members of TfA and deported. You can read that lawsuit HERE.
Importantly, all five denied being members of TfA. Several claimed they fled Venezuela because they feared TfA would kill them and were seeking asylum on that basis. I don’t know whether they are, or are not TfA members, which of course raises the obvious question. Who decides?
On Friday the judge hearing the case issued an order applicable to the five named plaintiffs temporarily barring their removal from the country pending further review on the merits. He scheduled an exceptionally rare Saturday evening hearing to determine whether to expand that to the entire class of people affected by Trump’s deportation plan.
As the Trump Regime loaded hundreds of alleged TfA members onto planes the judge ruled the statute could not be used in the manner sought by the Trump Regime. He ordered all the deportations and flights stopped. He ordered that any flights already in the air return to the United States pending further adjudication of the matter. Again, none of these alleged gang members would return to be free in the country, all would be returned to prisons the United States.
In clear defiance of the judge’s order the Trump Regime proceeded with the flights. At least one plane took off after the order, and others in the air, proceeded to El Salvador, a nation that has no connection to these alleged Venezuelan gang members at all.
The Trump Regime is paying the El Salvador government $6 million in tax dollars to hold about 250 of these people in a notoriously brutal prison. The United States is spending tax dollars to have El Salvador act as an extension of our prison system to hold people in conditions amounting to torture.
The issue here is not whether these people were TfA gang members. The issue is not even whether the judge’s legal analysis was ultimately right (though I think it clearly was).
The issue is that when a president looses a judicial ruling, right or wrong, the remedy is appeal, not defiance. Without that, the rule of law is lost. We become a nation, not of laws, but of men. Men who can decide to overrule and defy the law whenever they believe they are in the right.
This mindset was declared by Trump himself when he stated: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” That quote is generally attributed to Napoleon, another dictator. If you take that approach whatever country you “save” is no longer a democracy with a people protected by the rule of law.
Trump’s brilliance here was in first choosing to openly subvert the rule of law with what is likely a popular act by trammeling the rights of those generally regarded as bad people. That popularity does not reduce the risks associated with destroying the rule of law. Despots generally start undermining the rule of law by doing things the people deem worthy.
This is not about how this effects these 250 alleged gang members. It’s about how the precedent can undermine the rule of law in general, to deny all of us its protections.
The judge will now be asked to find the Trump Regime in contempt of court. The real danger will come when, for the first time, the Trump Regime responds, “so what?”
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