TOPSHOT - US President Donald Trump speaks to the press about the conflict in Ukraine before boarding Air Force One at Andrews Air Force Base March 14, 2025, in Maryland. Trump is spending the weekend at his Florida Mar-a-Lago resort. (Photo by Brendan Smialowski / AFP) (Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)
Trump has been promising to invoke this year since at least 2023 (Picture: Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images)
Donald Trump has brought back a wartime law from 1798 to speed up mass deportations.
Controversial even when it was introduced, the Alien Enemies Act was last used to intern 120,000 people of Japanese heritage, along with tens of thousands of Germans and Italians, during World War Two.
Sent to prison camps without trial, many stayed there for years on end.
Now the US President has invoked it to tackle what he claims is an ‘invasion’ by Tren De Aragua, an international criminal organisation from Venezuela. He has been saying he’ll bring it back since the early days of his campaign in 2023.
In a proclamation released on Saturday, Trump said: ‘Tren de Aragua (TdA) is a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization with thousands of members, many of whom have unlawfully infiltrated the United States and are conducting irregular warfare and undertaking hostile actions against the United States.’
Trump accuses the group of flooding the USA with drugs and ‘mass illegal migration’ to destabilise US democracy at the behest of the Nicolas Maduro government in Venezuela.
In January, Trump vowed to send 30,000 people to the USA’s Guantánamo Bay detention facility on Cuba.
Taliban prisoners in orange jumpsuits sitingt in holding area under the watchful eyes of military police at Camp X-Ray at Naval Base Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, during in-processing to the temporary detention facility on Jan. 11, 2002. The detainees will be given a ba sic physical exam by a doctor, to include a chest x-ray and blood samples drawn to assess their health. (Photo by Shane McCoy/Greg Mathieson/Mai/Getty Images)
Guantánamo’s longest detainee – Ridah bin Saleh al-Yazidi, 56 – was at the facility from when it opened in January 2002 until his release last December, without ever being charged with a crime (Picture: Getty Images)
The facility was made famous by its use for torture and detention without trial of people as young as 14 during the USA’s so-called ‘War on Terror’.
Some – a group of 11 from Yemen – were transferred from Guantánamo to Oman in January after being held there for more than 20 years.
Announcing a plan to use the facility for the ‘worst criminal illegal aliens’, Trump said: ‘Some of them are so bad we don’t even trust the countries to hold them because we don’t want them coming back, so we’re going to send them out to Guantanamo.’
Mirroring the language used in relation to the Alien Enemies Act, it is likely Trump invocation of it is part of this plan.
In today’s order, Trump said: ‘Alien Enemies shall be subject to removal to any such location.’
But despite being intended to fast track mass detentions and deportations, it’s unlikely to go down smoothly.
Earlier on Saturday, a federal judge in Washington stopped Trump’s administration from deporting five Venezuelans under the anticipated order.
Last month, a court also blocked an attempt to send three Venezuelans, held in New Mexico, from being sent to Guantánamo.
This suggests a legal battle is brewing that may hamper Trump’s desire for a swift exit for those he seeks to deport.
Human rights group Amnesty International said Trump’s decision to invoke the act is ‘deeply shameful’.
Amy Fischer, director of its refugee and migrant rights program in the USA, said: ‘It is yet another step in his administration’s racist and cruel attack on immigrants, many of whom are already living in fear as unlawful arrests and detentions take place across the US.’
Migrants, recently released from a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center, wear ankle monitors while waiting to board flights at the Shreveport Regional Airport (SHV) in Shreveport, Louisiana, US, on Wednesday, Aug. 14, 2024. In 2019, five ICE detention centers opened in Louisiana, bringing the state's total to nine. All the new centers were former jails, operated by private contractors. The shift began under Trump, but it has intensified under President Joe Biden. Photographer: Wayan Barre/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Detainees released from ICE (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement) centres wear ankle monitors while awaiting deportation (Picture: Wayan Barre/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
She added: ‘Immigrants make our communities stronger in countless ways.
‘The anti-immigrant rhetoric and heartless policies and practices coming from the Trump administration will only make us stronger in our support for people seeking safety and other immigrants in the US.’
But its effects may not just be limited to immigrants.
‘There’s nothing in the law itself that would require it to be limited to undocumented individuals or individuals who have committed crimes’, Katherine Yon Ebright, counsel on the liberty and national security team at the center-left Brennan Center for Justice, told NPR.
‘It’s not about legal status, consistent with the idea that it’s a wartime authority, not an immigration authority.’
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