A federal judge ruled that President Donald Trump's administration could not use the Alien Enemies Act to detain or deport the Venezuelan migrants who brought the case, finding that the wartime law had been invoked unlawfully. US District Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr., who was appointed by Trump, concluded that the conditions required by the 1798 statute were not present.
The Alien Enemies Act permits action against non-citizens in circumstances involving war or invasion. Rodriguez said its language applies when the United States faces an armed, organized attack. The administration's description of migration and alleged gang activity did not meet that standard, he found, so the executive branch could not rely on the act to hold or remove the named petitioners.
Trump had issued a proclamation in March asserting that the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua was invading the United States and conducting irregular warfare. His administration used that claim to send two planeloads of alleged gang members to the high-security Cecot prison in El Salvador without ordinary court proceedings. Neither the US government nor El Salvador had provided details establishing the deportees' alleged crimes or gang affiliations in the evidence supplied for the ruling.
Rodriguez also rejected the administration's argument that the president's decision to invoke the law was beyond judicial review. If a president could define the statutory conditions alone, declare that those conditions existed and then prevent courts from examining the decision, he reasoned, the legal limits imposed by Congress would have little force. Such an approach would also displace the judiciary's established role in interpreting federal statutes.
The decision marked the first time a federal judge had declared Trump's use of the Alien Enemies Act unlawful. It addressed whether the executive branch could use that specific statute against the petitioners, not the full range of immigration authorities available to the federal government. The administration had not commented in the supplied report.
The history of the act reinforced the court's reading. Before the Trump administration's action, it had been used only three times: during the War of 1812, World War One and World War Two. Each of those applications arose from an armed conflict, a record Rodriguez found consistent with the ordinary meaning of the law's terms. He concluded that the historical evidence did not support applying it to the alleged activities of Tren de Aragua under the facts presented.
The ruling placed a judicial boundary around one of the administration's most aggressive deportation tools. Its practical effect was to prevent detention or removal of the named Venezuelan petitioners under the Alien Enemies Act. More broadly, the judgment affirmed that courts retain authority to decide whether a president has satisfied the conditions Congress wrote into a wartime law. The administration could continue pursuing immigration enforcement through other legal channels, but this particular route was unavailable in the case before Rodriguez.
The case also separated an allegation of gang membership from the statutory question the court had to decide. Even if the government identifies a migrant as a Tren de Aragua member, Rodriguez found that the executive must still satisfy the Alien Enemies Act's requirements before using that law. The judgment therefore turned on congressional language and the asserted absence of an armed organized attack, not on a general judicial finding about every person deported to El Salvador.
