Advocates for men targeted for deportation under President Donald Trump’s invocation of wartime powers against a Venezuelan gang are trying to move their legal fight to Manhattan, even though the Supreme Court expected it would play out in Texas.
The unexpected development may mean that some of the litigation over Trump’s deportation bid will occur before a Clinton-appointed judge and an ideologically mixed federal appeals court in New York, rather than under the purview of the most conservative appeals court in the country.
Legal Battle Shifts to New York
Lawyers for Venezuelan nationals living in the United States initially filed a class-action lawsuit in Washington, D.C. and obtained a broad court order blocking deportations under the two-century-old Alien Enemies Act. But the Supreme Court lifted that order Monday and, in doing so, likely shut down the Washington-based case.
Now the question is how — and where — further legal challenges will proceed.
New York Court Enters the Fray
But lawyers for two detainees sued Tuesday in federal court in Manhattan. The lawyers said their clients had been transferred from Texas to a county detention center in Goshen, New York, last week. The case was assigned to U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein, who played a brief role in one of Trump’s criminal cases.
The Clinton-appointed judge set an initial hearing for Wednesday at 10 a.m. and will consider an emergency request from the American Civil Liberties Union to bar the government from transporting the two men out of the New York area while the litigation is in progress.
Legal Strategy and Challenges Ahead
Many of the other people targeted by Trump as ‘alien enemies’ are still detained in Texas. Under the Supreme Court’s Monday ruling, they will likely need to file their own cases there.
And about 130 other Venezuelans have already been deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador. Their lawyers, too, could try to file lawsuits seeking their return to the United States, though their route to do so — and their chance of success — is uncertain.
The Trump administration has claimed that the deportees are members of Tren de Aragua, a violent gang that the administration has designated as a terrorist organization. Lawyers for the men targeted say the administration has produced little evidence to back up those claims and, in fact, has deported some individuals who are certainly not gang members.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who wrote a dissent from the high court’s ruling Monday, indicated repeatedly that the court’s majority was slamming the door on a class action, which she suggested would be more efficient than ‘individual habeas petitions filed in district courts across the country.’
The order from the majority doesn’t explicitly rule out a national class action, but the language about pursuing cases only in the ‘district of confinement’ seemed to throw cold water on that idea.
