El Salvador jails deported Venezuelan gang members as US defies court ruling

The United States flew more than 200 alleged members of a Venezuelan gang to be imprisoned in El Salvador, President Nayib Bukele said Sunday, after US counterpart Donald Trump controversially invoked wartime legislation to expel them.

The deportations took place despite a US federal judge granting a temporary suspension of the expulsions order — apparently as planes were headed to El Salvador — raising questions over whether the Trump administration deliberately defied the court decision.

“Oopsie … Too late,” Bukele posted on social media in response to an article on the judge’s ruling, adding a crying-with-laughter emoji.

White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt denied that officials had refused to comply with the court order, which the Trump administration is appealing, as she said the deportees had already left the United States.

“A single judge in a single city cannot direct the movements of an aircraft carrier full of foreign alien terrorists who were physically expelled from U.S. soil,” Leavitt wrote in a statement.

Civil rights groups have warned that if Trump’s invocation of the centuries-old Alien Enemies Act law is upheld in courts, it could allow the deportation of huge numbers of adult migrants without explanation or a court hearing.

‘Gang members’ arrive in El Salvador

Bukele announced Sunday that 238 members of Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, which Trump has designated a foreign terrorist organisation, had arrived in El Salvador.

He shared a video on X of several men in handcuffs and shackles being transferred from a plane to a heavily guarded convoy, while the presidency shared photos showing prisoners’ heads being shaved upon arrival in El Salvador.

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AFP did not have access to the prisoners during their transfer nor was given details of the circumstances in which the images were taken. The El Salvador presidency released the only images of the event.

The Washington Post, citing a White House official, said 137 of prisoners deported Saturday were under the Alien Enemies Act. It said a total of 261 people were deported.

Bukele said the United States would “pay a very low fee” to El Salvador but did not specify the amount.

Mega-jail with windowless cells

In a post Sunday on his Truth Social platform, Trump referred to the deportees as “monsters sent into our Country by Crooked Joe Biden and the Radical Left Democrats,” and thanked El Salvador for receiving them.

The US president on Friday had signed an order invoking the little-known Alien Enemies Act of 1798, but it was not publicly announced until Saturday.

The wartime authority allows a president to detain or deport citizens of an enemy nation.

It has been invoked only three times — during the War of 1812 to expel British nationals, during World War I against nationals from enemy nations and, most notoriously, during World War II for the internment of more than 100 000 Japanese citizens and Japanese Americans.

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The iron-fisted Bukele

Bukele, in a meeting last month with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, had offered to house prisoners from the United States in his country, including members of Tren de Aragua and El Salvador’s own MS-13 gang.

The iron-fisted leader is extremely popular in his country for a successful crackdown on violent gangs, but has faced criticism from human rights groups.

Bukele said the alleged gang members had been sent to the country’s maximum security Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), a mega-prison southeast of the capital San Salvador with capacity for 40,000 prisoners.

Inmates there are packed in windowless cells, sleep on metal beds with no mattresses and are forbidden visitors.

‘Wartime powers’

In a sharp rebuke Sunday, Venezuela’s government said Trump had “criminalised” Venezuelan migrants, whom it said were “in their immense majority… dignified and honest” workers.

Trump, in his order, claimed Tren de Aragua was “conducting irregular warfare against the territory of the United States both directly and at the direction, clandestine or otherwise, of the Maduro regime” in Caracas.

The order will apply to all Venezuelan Tren de Aragua members who are over 14 and not naturalised US citizens or lawful permanent residents.

The ACLU rights group and an allied group, Democracy Forward, asked a US District Court in Washington to bar the deportations — arguing that the 1798 act was not intended for use in peacetime.

A Democracy Forward statement called Saturday a “horrific day in the history of the nation, when the president publicised that he was seeking to invoke extraordinary wartime powers in the absence of a war or invasion.”

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