WASHINGTON: The Trump administration has deported alleged members of a Venezuelan gang from the US despite a court order forbidding it from doing so, saying in an extraordinary statement that a judge did not have the authority to block its actions.

The deportation operation followed a move by Judge James Boasberg to block President Donald Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act’s wartime powers to rapidly deport more than 200 alleged members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang that has been linked to kidnapping, extortion and contract killings.

“A single judge in a single city cannot direct the movements of an aircraft … full of foreign alien terrorists who were physically expelled from US soil,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement.

She said the court had “no lawful basis” and that federal courts generally have no jurisdiction over how a president conducts foreign affairs.

The turn of events represented a remarkable escalation in Trump’s challenge to the US Constitution’s system of checks and balances and the independence of the judicial branch of government.

Patrick Eddington, a homeland security and civil liberties legal expert at the libertarian Cato Institute, said that, whatever it might say, the White House was in “open defiance” of the judge. “This is beyond the pale and certainly unprecedented,” Eddington said, calling it the most radical test of America’s system of checks and balances since the Civil War.

Published in Dawn, March 18th, 2025