Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs A federal judge on Monday kept in place his ruling barring the Trump administration from using a powerful wartime statute to summarily deport Venezuelan migrants it deemed to be members of a violent street gang.In a 37-page order, the judge, James E. Boasberg, said the block should remain in place so that the migrants could have the opportunity to challenge accusations that they belong to the gang, Tren de Aragua, before being flown out of the country to a prison in El Salvador under the wartime law known as the Alien Enemies Act.That law, Judge Boasberg wrote, “arguably envisions that those caught up in its web must be given the opportunity to seek such review.”Later on Monday, a federal appeals court in Washington held a nearly two-hour hearing on the administration’s request to nullify Judge Boasberg’s order, taking up many of the same issues.The three-judge panel did not issue an immediate ruling. But during questioning, a Justice Department lawyer acknowledged that if the court were to reverse Judge Boasberg, the administration could immediately resume transferring people to the Salvadoran prison.From the moment Judge Boasberg entered his initial order on March 15, Mr. Trump and his allies have accused him of overstepping his authority by intruding on the president’s prerogative to conduct foreign affairs. But the question at the heart of the case turns equally on the issue of whether Mr. Trump himself overstepped by ignoring limits set out in the text of the act and in the Constitution for when and how wartime deportations can take place.The Alien Enemies Act, which was passed in 1798, gives the government wide latitude during an invasion or a time of war to summarily round up subjects of a “hostile nation” who are over the age of 14, and remove them from the country with little or no due process.The administration has repeatedly claimed that the Venezuelan migrants in question are members of Tren de Aragua and should be considered subjects of a hostile nation because Mr. Trump has said they were acting at the direction of the Venezuelan government.The White House has also insisted that the arrival to the United States of dozens of members of the gang constitutes an invasion or a “predatory incursion” under the law, which can prompt a president’s wartime deportation powers even in the absence of a declared war.Lawyers for Venezuelan migrants have maintained that the law cannot be used against Tren de Aragua members because the gang is not a government and its activities do not amount to an invasion. Notably, the U.S. intelligence community circulated an assessment last month concluding that the gang is not under the control of the Venezuelan government, contrary to what Mr. Trump has since contended.The lawyers have also questioned whether many of the migrants the administration has accused of belonging to Tren de Aragua are actually members of the gang. They have argued that the Venezuelans should be able to challenge those determinations before being flown out of the country.When Judge Boasberg initially paused the flights, he said his decision was based on both the lack of due process the migrants received and on the larger question about whether Mr. Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act truly fit the situation at hand.But in keeping the restraining order in place, the judge wrote that he had relied solely on the issue of due process. He added that he did not need to “resolve the thorny question of whether the judiciary has the authority to assess” Mr. Trump’s claim that the Alien Enemies Act can be legitimately used against Tren de Aragua as a group.“It follows that summary deportation following close on the heels of the government’s informing an alien that he is subject to the proclamation — without giving him the opportunity to consider whether to voluntarily self-deport or challenge the basis for the order — is unlawful,” Judge Boasberg wrote.During the hearing on Monday before the three-judge appeals court panel, two of the judges seemed to agree that the migrants the government wants to remove under the law could go to court to challenge whether they were actually members of Tren de Aragua.But it was unclear what those challenges might ultimately look like.One of the judges, Patricia A. Millett, a Democratic appointee, signaled skepticism with the government’s position that the panel should stay Judge Boasberg’s restraining order.She grilled a Justice Department lawyer, suggesting that if the Venezuelans could be deported without due process then anyone — herself included — could simply be declared a national security threat and flown out of the country. And Judge Millett pointed out that even German citizens arrested under the Alien Enemies Act during World War II had the opportunity to argue in hearings that the law did not apply to them.“Nazis got better treatment under the Alien Enemies Act,” she said.A second judge, Justin R. Walker, a Republican appointee, agreed that the migrants could challenge whether they were covered by Mr. Trump’s invocation of the wartime act, but he appeared to be skeptical of allowing Judge Boasberg’s order to stay in place for technical reasons.He repeatedly suggested that if migrants wanted to challenge their removal, they should do so not in Washington, but in places like Texas where they are being held.The third judge on the panel, Karen L. Henderson, who is also a Republican appointee, said almost nothing at the hearing.In a separate but related dispute, Judge Boasberg has given the department until Tuesday to decide if it intends to invoke a rare doctrine called the state secrets privilege in an effort to get around disclosing detailed information about two deportation flights to El Salvador this month.Judge Boasberg wants that information as he seeks to determine if the administration let the flights continue on their way in violation of an oral ruling he made from the bench instructing them to turn around.In a court filing on Monday morning, lawyers for the Venezuelans said there were “sufficient undisputed facts in the record and in the public domain” for Judge Boasberg to find that the government violated his initial order. The lawyers noted that two planes of migrants took off at 5:26 p.m. and 5:45 p.m. on March 15 and were still in the air when the judge ordered them to turn around at about 6:45 p.m.In their filing, the lawyers also offered new information that they said contradicted the government’s contention that all of those removed to El Salvador were Venezuelan gang members. The lawyers said that as many as eight of the migrants who were accused of being gang members were women and that at least one was from Nicaragua, not Venezuela.The administration has provided only limited information tying the migrants to the gang. In one recent filing, the Justice Department acknowledged that several of the people suspected of being in the gang did not have criminal records in the United States mostly because they had not been in the country very long.And even as the administration acknowledged that it had few details about some of the deportees, it argued that its dearth of information about them only showed that they were dangerous..“The lack of a criminal record does not indicate they pose a limited threat,” an immigration official wrote in a filing, adding that based upon the migrants’ purported link to the gang, “the lack of specific information about each individual actually highlights the risk they pose.”“It demonstrates that they are terrorists with regard to whom we lack a complete profile,” the official continued.
