Saturday evening, platforms transportation More than two hundred alleged members of a Venezuelan gang, Tren of Aragua (ADD), left the United States for El Salvador. Their arrival was welcomed by Nayib Bukele, president of El Salvador.
Bukele, like the Washington Post reports“Shared video showing prisoners arriving at the airport, surrounded by highly armed and camouflaged men.” His video “showed that the masked officers then forced the men on their knees, shaved their heads and walked them in white shirts and shorts in a block of cells”.
President of El Salvador published the following cryptic message on x: “Oopsy, too late.” The meaning of this message would have been indecipherable, but for the fact that it was accompanied by a photo of a New York post title: “The federal judge orders expulsion flights carrying alleged venezuelan gangbangers to return to us, prevents Trump from invoking the law on enemy extraterrestrials.”
Bukele, who qualified as “coolest dictator in the world“Showed to help flout Praise praise on the dictator and replied“Thank you for your help and friendship, President Bukele.”
But the Americans have engaged in the rule of law and the survival of constitutional democracy should not feel pleasure or gratitude or for the action of the Trump administration or for a dictator who helped him and encourage him to escape a court order. What the administration has done with the Venezuelans shows the lengths to which it will go to transform our government of limited powers and separated into a government of unlimited executive power concentrated in a single man.
I suspect that what happened this weekend will again make President Trump feel like a king and will be used to justify his point of view “The one who saves his country violates any law.” The fact that he has accomplished his objectives with stealth can only add to his pleasure.
I do not feel any sympathy for those who would be involved in “the transnational gang known as Tren de Aragua”. But that does not excuse what the administration has done.
In my opinion, he crossed the Rubicon by the way he treated them and by his cavalier attitude towards our constitutional traditions and the commitment to respect the courts as a final arbitrators of the legal meaning.
Commentators told us that we would enter into an unexplored territory and that we felt a constitutional crisis if Trump “” Obviously “(and)” blatant “has exceeded its constitutional authority. “”
Last month, NPR quoted The law professor Amanda Frost, who declared that our constitutional system would fail if “the executive branch … (takes) the position that it can violate the judicial orders or that it does not need to comply with the judicial orders. So, so long, “she said, as we say in a system in which the system will draw.
This weekend, this hope was put to a severe test.
It started on Friday. President Trump signed a proclamation demanding the authority below Alien Enemies Act of 1798 To send the Venezuelans outside the country.
Like the Brennan Center for Justice explainThis law is “a war authority which allows the president to hold or expel the natives and the citizens of an enemy nation. The law authorizes the president to target these immigrants without hearing and based solely on their country of birth or citizenship. ”
The center of Brennan notes that “the president can invoke the law on extraterrestrial enemies during” declared war “or when a foreign government threatens or undertakes a” invasion “or a” predatory foray “against the American territory”. The law “was only used three times before to ban citizens from hostile enemy governments of the United States, and only during a declared war”.
The president’s proclamation was clearly designed in thinking about the provisions of the law. “Tren de Aragua (ADD),” he said, “is a foreign terrorist organization designated with thousands of members, many of whom illegally infiltrated the United States and carry out an irregular war and undertake hostile actions against the United States.”
He continued by saying that “Nicolas Maduro, who claims to act as president of Venezuela … Coordinates with and relies on ADD … to make (his) objective to use illegal narcotics as a weapon to” flood “the United States”. But the proclamation was held under the Wraps, as Washinton post said“Until the defenders of immigrants continued on Saturday, fearing to leave immigrants from the country.”
On Saturday, the American district judge James Boasberg, the chief judge of the Columbia district, made a temporary ban prescription Block the Trump administration plan. The judge wanted to preserve the status quo until he could determine whether the president had abused the law on extraterrestrial enemies in the absence of a war or a real invasion.
In the meantime, Boasberg has asked the administration to immediately return to the United States all the flights that had already left. And he left no doubt about his order.
“This is something,” said the judge, “you have to make sure you are immediately respected.” But compliance did not appear on the agenda of the administration.
Prosecutor General Pam Bondi clearly indicated when she published a statement After the decision of the judge who called him to rally to “terrorists on the security of the Americans”. She said that in his opinionHis order “does not take into account the well -established authority concerning the power of President Trump, and this endangers the public and the police”.
And, Sunday, Karoline Leavitt, the press secretary of the White House, said that “the judge’s order had” no lawful basis and was published after the deportees “had already been withdrawn from the American territory”. »»
Of course, the GA and the administration are entitled to their opinion on the authority of the president and the decision of judge Boasberg. But under our Constitution, they do not have the right to escape or defy an order of the court.
The Supreme Court made this clearly clearly in 1967. “An injunction,” said the court, “dearning a general jurisdiction of general jurisdiction … must be respected by them, but erroneous, the action of the court may be …”
“It is for the court … to determine the question of the validity of the law, and until its decision is reversed … either by itself, or by a higher court, its orders based on its decision must be respected.”
Judge Potter Stewart, who wrote the majority opinion in this case, explained that “we can sympathize with the impatient commitment of the petitioners towards their cause. But respect for the judicial process is a small price to pay for the civilizing hand of the law, which alone can give a respectful meaning of constitutional freedom. ”
These words have a special resonance today. “(N) o man,” observed Stewart, “may be a judge in his own case, but has exalted his station, whatever the just his motivations….”
The black deportation of the night by the Trump administration of Venezuelan immigrants is no exception to this rule. This action suggests that the president and his colleagues have fully intended to act as judges in their own cases and to assume the legislator and the judge, regardless of the Constitution.
The crisis that Professor Frost hoped to arrive has ever become an American reality.
