Supreme Court Bars Trump From Removing Venezuelan Illegal Criminals Under the Alien Enemies Act

SCOTUS has blocked President Trump’s ability to deport criminal gang members back to Venezuela under the Alien Enemies Act without “proper notice”. Tens of millions of illegals invaded our country with no due process but SCOTUS rules they cannot be deported without due process. As Clay Travis said, “The fundamental issue at play is this: US law isn’t applied strictly for their arrival, but it is applied strictly for their departure. Which means the barrier to arrival is nonexistent and the barrier to expulsion is massive. The result is untenable.”

The 7-2 ruling found that the administration violated the Venezuelans’ due process rights by not providing sufficient notice before their removal. Only two justices, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, dissented. That’s it.

Jonathan Turley explains:

Both the legality of using the act and the required notice remain undecided (beyond the fact that 24 hours is clearly not enough)…

The Supreme Court delivered a blow to the Trump Administration in blocking deportations under the Alien Enemies Act. However, the Court only did so based on the lack of notice (24 hours) afforded by the Administration. It did not rule on the legality of the use of the Alien Enemies Act…

…The court is pumping the brakes as a warning to the Administration that it must give these individuals and the courts more time to consider these issues.”

The court on Friday again temporarily barred the Trump administration from removing from the United States a group of Venezuelan men under an 18th-century wartime law, known as the Alien Enemies Act, until an appeals court in Louisiana rules on their case again. Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented from the unsigned decision.

These 4 SCOTUS Judges chose Illegal Invaders over the American Citizen which they’ve sworn an oath to protect. Shame on them. pic.twitter.com/eaebHBL7t5

— Liz Churchill (@liz_churchill10) May 16, 2025

There are 20 million illegals in this country. The “due process” the Supreme Court has decreed today means it is impossible to ever remove all of them from this country in any of our lives. This has always been the Democrat long game. They believe these illegals are their voters.

— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) May 16, 2025

President Trump on the ruling:

“The Supreme Court has just ruled that the worst murderers, drug dealers, gang members, and even those who are mentally insane, who came into our Country illegally, are not allowed to be forced out without going through a long, protracted, and expensive Legal Process, one that will take, possibly, many years for each person, and one that will allow these people to commit many crimes before they even see the inside of a Courthouse. The result of this decision will let more CRIMINALS pour into our Country, doing great harm to our cherished American public. It will also encourage other criminals to illegally enter our Country, wreaking havoc and bedlam wherever they go. The Supreme Court of the United States is not allowing me to do what I was elected to do. Sleepy Joe Biden allowed MILLIONS of Criminal Aliens to come into our Country without any “PROCESS” but, in order to get them out of our Country, we have to go through a long and extended PROCESS. In any event, thank you to Justice Alito and Justice Thomas for attempting to protect our Country. This is a bad and dangerous day for America!”

JUST IN: Amy Comey Barrett sides with the liberals and blocks President Trump from deporting Venezuelans under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.

Unreal. pic.twitter.com/8v07fZ2HEu

— Ian Jaeger (@IanJaeger29) May 16, 2025

Supreme Court Punts On “Due Process”

How Much Process Is Due Deportees Under The AEA?

By: Peter Nayland Kust, May 16, 2025:

While the Supreme Court’s responsibility is to resolve Constitutional questions regarding “due process”, the Supreme Court’s latest ruling involving the Alien Enemies Act fails completely. Where the Court has a duty to bring clarity, it instead created more confusion.

Instead of giving a clear statement of Constitutional principle, the Court ruled merely that it wanted to keep its options open for future Alien Enemies Act challenges. The Court was asked to reach a final decision, and chose to punt instead.

Curiously, this latest ruling in A.A.R.P v Trump1 even states explicitly that it is merely a holding action, and finds only that the presumed Tren de Aragua gang members held at a North Texas detention facility are entitled to more time than initially provided to file habeas corpus challenges to their detention and removal.

To be clear, we decide today only that the detainees are entitled to more notice than was given on April 18, and we grant temporary injunctive relief to preserve our jurisdiction while the question of what notice is due is adjudicated.

At issue is a question that, amazingly, the Court already answered: “how much process is due under the Alien Enemies Act?” The answer, per the Supreme Court, is a habeas corpus petition. That was the explicit finding in Trump v J.G.G2 (emphasis added):

Challenges to removal under the AEA, a statute which largely “ ‘preclude[s] judicial review,’ ” Ludecke v. Watkins, 335 U.S. 160, 163−164, (1948), must be brought in habeas.

The language of this latest ruling confirms that a deportees only avenue for legal challenge is a habeas petition.

Continued….

Over at The SCOTUS blog:

The Supreme Court on Friday afternoon extended its ban on the removal from the United States of Venezuelan men currently in immigration custody in the northern region of Texas. In an eight-page unsigned opinion, the justices sent the case back to a federal appeals court for another look and blocked the Trump administration from removing any of the men from the United States under an 18th-century wartime law until the appeals are resolved. 

The court instructed the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit to determine the kind of procedures to which detainees are entitled to challenge the removals. But it indicated that the procedures that the government used in April, when it was ready to carry out removals before the Supreme Court stepped in, were not enough to satisfy the Constitution’s guarantee of fair treatment.

Justice Samuel Alito dissented from the court’s order, in a 14-page opinion joined by Justice Clarence Thomas. In Alito’s view, the Supreme Court had “no authority to issue any relief.”

Friday’s opinion was yet another chapter in a dispute that began in March, when the Trump administration initiated efforts to remove noncitizens who it designated as members of a Venezuelan gang, known as Tren de Aragua, pursuant to a March 15 executive order issued by President Donald Trump. The order relied on the Alien Enemies Act, a 1798 law that gives the president the power to detain or remove citizens of an enemy nation without a hearing or any other review by a court if Congress declares war or there is an “invasion” or “predatory incursion.” The law has only been invoked three times, during the War of 1812, World War I, and World War II.

In his March 15 order, Trump indicated that members of Tren de Aragua were “perpetrating, attempting, and threatening an invasion or predatory incursion” against the United States. Therefore, he concluded, any Venezuelan citizen in the United States who is 14 years old or older can be “apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed as” an alien enemy.

Even before Trump’s order went into effect, a group of detainees went to federal court in Washington, D.C., asking Chief U.S. District Judge James Boasberg to stop their removal and challenging their designation under the Alien Enemies Act.

Boasberg directed the federal government not to remove anyone under the Alien Enemies Act, but news reports later indicated that more than 200 noncitizens were taken to El Salvador from the United States on March 15, after Boasberg issued his order. The detainees were taken to El Salvador’s notorious maximum-security prison.

On April 7, the Supreme Court put Boasberg’s order on hold. It explained that the detainees had brought their challenge in the wrong place: Because they were challenging their designation as alien enemies, they should have filed their lawsuits as petitions for habeas corpus in Texas, where they were being held, rather than in Washington.

The Supreme Court also told the government that it should provide anyone who was designated for removal under the Alien Enemies Act with notice of that designation, which must be provided in a time and manner that will allow them to challenge the removal before it occurs.

In the wake of those instructions, a group of Venezuelan men in immigration custody in the northern region of Texas went to federal court on April 16, seeking once again to block their removal under the Alien Enemies Act.

U.S. District Judge James Wesley Hendrix denied their request, indicating that the detainees were likely “not facing such an imminent threat.”

The detainees returned to Hendrix and renewed their request, telling him that some of them had been notified that their removal could indeed occur at any moment. Moreover, they told him, even the men who had received notices had only received notices in English, even though most of them speak only Spanish, and the notices did not inform the men that they can challenge their designation as “alien enemies.”

When Hendrix had not yet acted on their request, the detainees went to the 5th Circuit and then to the Supreme Court. Shortly before 1 a.m. on April 19, the Supreme Court ordered the government “not to remove any member of” the would-be class of detainees from the United States unless and until the Supreme Court indicates otherwise.

In its unsigned opinion on Friday afternoon, the justices explained that the court of appeals was wrong when it dismissed the detainees’ appeal on the ground that it lacked the power to review it. Appeals courts, the court reasoned, have the power to review non-final orders that “have ‘the practical effect of refusing an injunction.’” When a federal district court does not take action “in the face of extreme urgency and a high risk of ‘serious, perhaps irreparable,’ consequences may have” precisely that effect – as Hendrix’s failure to rule on the detainees’ request for more than 14 hours did, the court concluded.

Turning to the question of the notice that the detainees in this case received and whether they had a meaningful opportunity to challenge their removals, the court observed that the Trump administration did not challenge the detainees’ description of the barebones notice provided to them, or that it was preparing to carry out removals before the Supreme Court intervened on April 19. Moreover, the justices added, when the Trump administration has said that it cannot “provide for the return” of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man whom the government admits was mistakenly sent to an El Salvadoran prison, the “detainees’ interests at stake are accordingly particularly weighty.”

In this case, the justices concluded, the notice that the government did provide to detainees – “roughly 24 hours before removal, devoid of information about how to” contest that removal, “surely does not pass muster.” But the court of appeals, rather than the Supreme Court, should “determine in the first instance the precise process necessary to satisfy the Constitution in this case,” the justices wrote.

Finally, the justices stressed that they were not addressing whether the detainees can actually be removed under the Alien Enemies Act. Instead, they merely “recognize[d] the significance of the Government’s national security interest as well as the necessity that such interests be pursued in a manner consistent with the Constitution. In light of the foregoing, lower courts should address AEA cases expeditiously.”

Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a short separate concurring opinion in which he emphasized that the court’s opinion today “simply ensures that the Judiciary can decide whether these Venezuelan detainees may be lawfully removed under the Alien Enemies Act before they are in fact removed.” He added that, if it were up to him, he would have kept the case in the Supreme Court to resolve the “critical legal issues” quickly, rather than sending it back to the lower courts.

In his dissent, Alito disputed the majority’s suggestion that Hendrix had effectively denied the detainees’ request by failing to act on it, calling it a “mischaracterization of what happened in the District Court.” Instead, he posited, the detainees had made an “extraordinary demand,” and Hendrix was simply working very hard to respond to it quickly but carefully.

Alito also argued that the detainees were not entitled to emergency relief because they had not shown that they were likely to succeed on the merits – one of the requirements for temporary relief. But although the detainees needed to show “that they were likely to establish that class relief is available in a habeas proceeding” and that a class could be certified, Alito contended, they likely would be unable to do either of those things.