As justification to expel certain immigrants in the country without regular procedure, President Donald Trump said the United States was under invasion.
“The evidence shows irrefutably that (Tren of Aragua) invaded the United States,” said a proclamation of the White House on March 15. Tren de Aragua is a gang based in Venezuela with a certain American presence.
The proclamation says Tren of Aragua “Is a hybrid criminal state that perpetuates an invasion and a predatory incursion in the United States”, and therefore anyone 14 or over who is a member of Tren of Aragua and who has neither American citizenship nor permanent residence can be arrested and expelled using the 1978 extraterrestrial law law.
Trump and his allies have referred to undocumented immigration as an invasion for years, and his decision to use the act For deportations depends on this characterization. To invoke the law, the United States must be at war or under invasion by a foreign country.
But are the United States under invasion? And who decides if it happens?
Immigration and legal experts say that the United States is not under the invasion of a Venezuelan gang or any other group or countries, and that undocumented immigration alone is an invasion.
A federal judge temporarily blocked the Trump administration to use the extraterrestrial enemies law for expel people. The administration indicates that the judge's decision is illegal and usurpes the president's powers.
In the past, the courts have refused to decide whether immigration can be classified as an invasion, saying that it is a question of national security and foreign policy. But legal experts say that there are exceptions that could lead judges to reign over this issue, especially if the president acted in bad faith or made an obvious mistake.
Existing laws allow gang members to be expelled from the United States. But these laws require going through an immigration court. The Extraterrestrial Enemies Act by the regular procedure, such as appearance before an immigration judge.
What is the basis of the Trump administration to use the law on extraterrestrial enemies?
The law allows the president to hold and expel people from a “hostile nation or government” without audience when the United States is at war with this country or that the country has “perpetrated, attempted or threatened” an invasion or a raid legally called “predatory incursion” against the United States.
Trump's proclamation made two apparently contradictory arguments to prove that the presence of Tren of Aragua in the United States represents a foreign invasion.
First, the proclamation says that Tren de Aragua acts as an almost governmental in the Venezuelan territories where the Venezuelan government “gave in ever greater control”.
The proclamation also maintains that Tren de Aragua “is closely aligned, and has indeed infiltrated the Maduro regime”.
The White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a briefing of March 19 that Tren of Aragua had been sent to the United States by the Venezuelan government.
“A predatory foray is absolutely what happened with Tren de Aragua, they were sent here by the hostile regime of Maduro to Venezuela,” Leavitt said.
Noah Feldman, professor of law at Harvard University, wrote in a chronicle of March 17: “In other words, the Trump administration affirms both that the Gang is the government of Venezuela and that the gang is independent of the government of Venezuela.”
Trump said several timesWithout evidence, that countries in which Venezuela empty their prisons and send people to the United States.
Tren of Aragua has become and operated on a prison led by Venezuelan officials with government, Ronna Ronna, a Venezuelan journalist who published a book on Tren in Aragua, in an interview on March 18. She added that she had not seen any evidence to which the gang reacts or is led by the Venezuelan government or that he sent members of Tren of Aragua to the United States.
Is undocumented immigration alone an invasion?
Five legal experts that politifact interviewed and several others who wrote on the subject, say no.
“It is simply false as a question of law, fact and common decency to treat migrants as an” invasion “,” said Mary Ellen O'Connell, professor of law at the University of Notre-Dame. “The United States is not in a war with Venezuela; Venezuela does not threaten or undertake to invade the United States. ”
It is one thing to describe rhetorically immigration as an invasion, “but when you arrive in the legal field, words have a meaning,” said Katherine Yon Ebright, expert in constitutional war powers at the Brennan Center for Justice. “In the context of the Extraterrestrial Enemies Act, the invasion and the predatory foray have referred to the civil war or the armed attacks by organized soldiers or paramilitaries.”
Michael Gerhardt, professor of constitutional law at the University of North Chapel Hill, said: “If our government has evidence of a coordinated invasion in this country which has been designed by a foreign nation, it must have proof of it. Otherwise, it's fiction. “
What is an invasion?
The Constitution uses the term “invasion” four times, linked to national security, to the war powers of the federal government and with the close exception by virtue of which states can engage in war. But the Constitution does not define “the invasion”. And the United States Supreme Court also did not rule on its meaning.
The context and historical recordings put the expected meaning of “invasion” in the context.
The editors “have constantly characterized it as a military foray into American territory by a foreign state,” said Matthew Lindsay, professor of law at the University of Baltimore. He underlined the writings of former President James Madison in 1800: “The invasion is a war operation. Protecting against invasion is an exercise in the power of war. ”
Legal experts have underlined the three -time the extraterrestrial enemies Act was invoked – the War of 1812, the First World War and the Second World War – to illustrate the differences between and today. All previous invocations were in wartime.
Trump did not ask the Congress to declare war, as former president Franklin Delano Roosevelt did it after Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor, the last time the act was invoked.
“In fact, he did not even identify an armed attack that would trigger war law,” said Yon Ebright.
Yon Ebright stressed that Trump also said that the United States was no longer under invasion. Trump posted on March 1 on Truth Social: “The invasion of our country is over.”
What have the courts said about immigration and undocumented invasion?
In the 1990s, several states continued the federal government, saying that it had not protected an underside of undocumented immigration, forcing them to incur a budgetary burden. Four district courts rejected business; The judges said that they were unable to reign because business focused on political issues.
The federal courts generally refuse to reign on political issues – subjects according to which the Constitution makes the “single responsibility” of executive or legislative branches, said the Legal Information Institute of Cornell University.
Although the courts were not ruled in the 1990s on the question of whether undocumented immigration constituted an invasion, a federal judge declared in 1996 that an invasion should be perpetrated by another country or a foreign country and that this had not happened.
In February 2024, after Texas has adopted a law Particularly prevailing that it had been invaded by immigrants, a federal judge judged that “the overvoltages of immigration do not constitute an” invasion “within the meaning of the Constitution”. The case is pending after The state called against the decision.
