As a candidate, Donald J. Trump made no effort to obscure his plans for a vast clampdown on undocumented immigrants living in the United States. But his administration’s recent targeting of academics who are legally in-country and its deployment of an arcane legal theory to deport hundreds of Venezuelan men to El Salvador this month have come as something of a shock to the system.
That may be intentional, Charles Wheeler told America. Both actions represent efforts by the Trump administration to probe the boundaries of executive authority, he said.
Mr. Wheeler is a staff attorney for the Catholic Legal Immigration Network, a national advocacy and attorney training program founded by U.S. bishops to protect the rights and human dignity of immigrants.
Mr. Wheeler notes an audacious overreach by the administration that he believes should worry all American citizens. “Trump [is] flexing his power and trying to push the law into areas that have not been tested before,” Mr. Wheeler said, “using a 200-year-old law in a way that [it] was never meant to be used.”
“And the challenge really is not to the people affected but to the rule of law itself.”
“Obviously, we’re not being invaded by a foreign power,” he said, the basis of the Alien Enemies Act, passed in 1798, that the White House invoked to deport alleged gang members. “Trump throws out these theories—cutting off birthright citizenship, using the Alien Enemies Act, etc.…and some people think of that as ballsy and courageous. Other people think of it as just insane.”
But “what the Trump administration is doing,” Mr. Wheeler said, “is trying to deflect us from the issue of the rule of law and focus on the people themselves, saying, ‘These are criminals; these are gang members, these are dirtbag scum that you don’t want in the United States.’ They’re trying to divert attention from the actual law and procedure.”
The White House has also in recent weeks targeted law firms, academics and institutions of higher education. Mr. Wheeler argues that, taken together, the various efforts are an attempt to create facts on the ground that support the unitary executive theory of government, “an extreme right-wing theory that the president holds ultimate power and can do what he wants.”
“We had a revolution, and we developed a Constitution that [proceeds] from the theory that the king does not create law, the people do and the people abide by the law.”
[Related: Trump is not a king. Immigrants are not invaders.]
He points out the president already has “a lot of discretion as to who can come here and who can’t, and it’s not really subject to a lot of challenge.”
But “when you get to the issue of canceling a non-immigrant visa, then it gets a little more murky.” Rights of free expression and the demands of due process, according to the U.S. Constitution, apply to all “persons” in the United States, not just its native-born or naturalized citizens.
The effort to deport a Georgetown University researcher married to a Palestinian-American became the latest high-profile case of possible executive overreach this week. Badar Khan Suri, a postdoctoral scholar at Georgetown University and a citizen of India, was arrested on March 17 outside his home in Arlington, Va.
Hassan Ahmad, Mr. Suri’s Virginia-based attorney, wrote in a court filing that Mr. Suri was targeted because of his wife’s “identity as a Palestinian and her constitutionally protected speech.” Mr. Suri and his wife, Mapheze Saleh, “have long been doxxed and smeared,” the court filing stated.
Georgetown University said in a statement on March 19 that Mr. Suri is an Indian national who was “duly granted a visa to enter the United States to continue his doctoral research on peacebuilding in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
“We are not aware of him engaging in any illegal activity, and we have not received a reason for his detention,” the school said. “We support our community members’ rights to free and open inquiry, deliberation and debate, even if the underlying ideas may be difficult, controversial or objectionable. We expect the legal system to adjudicate this case fairly.”
Mr. Suri was accused of “spreading Hamas propaganda and promoting antisemitism on social media” and determined to be subject to deportation by the Secretary of State’s office, Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said on March 19 in a statement released on X.
On March 15, Mr. Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act for the first time since World War II, using the wartime authority to deport people allegedly associated with a Venezuelan gang, Tren de Agua. The White House provided no evidence connecting the deported men to the gang, nor did the administration explain what standards it used to determine gang affiliation.
In a statement on March 16, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt called the Venezuelan gang, “one of the most violent and ruthless terrorist gangs on planet earth.”
“TDA is a direct threat to the national security of the United States,” she said, describing the transnational gang as a “foreign terrorist organization.”
In terms of the treatment of the deported Venezuelans, Mr. Wheeler said: “There’s no semblance of due process. We don’t know who these people are, [or] whether, in fact, they are gang members.” But even gang members, he said, “have the right to legal protections.”
Under normal immigration procedures, according to Mr. Wheeler, the deported men should have had an opportunity to have their cases heard and asylum claims made before an immigration judge, and they should have been protected under the U.N. Convention Against Torture and other humanitarian law. “All of that is guaranteed,” Mr. Wheeler said, “and to bypass it under some fictitious theory that you can name these people terrorists and therefore they don’t have any rights is rather extreme.”
The White House stoked even more constitutional tensions by declining to respond to a federal court order to halt the deportation flights. Adding to the controversy was the administration’s decision not to deport the alleged gang members back to their native country, but to a high-security prison in El Salvador.
Anna Gallagher, the executive director of the Catholic Legal Immigration Network, said in a statement released on March 17, “We all want safe communities, but this is an unjust and unnecessary abuse of power.”
“The United States is not at war, and this policy will undoubtedly harm innocent people by denying them basic legal rights,” Ms. Gallagher said.
The U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement detainee locator website reports that Mr. Suri is currently held by immigration officials at the Alexandria Staging Facility in Louisiana. In a court filing on March 18, his lawyers are seeking his immediate release and a halt to deportation proceedings.
“The Trump Administration has openly expressed its intention to weaponize immigration law to punish noncitizens whose views are deemed critical of U.S. policy as it relates to Israel,” Mr. Suri’s attorney wrote. The attorney added that Mr. Suri’s detention more than 1,000 miles away from his family and attorney is “plainly intended as retaliation and punishment for Mr. Suri’s protected speech.”
The Alien Enemies Act was first enacted in 1798 amid fears immigrants—particularly Irish Catholics—would side with France in a potential conflict with the United States, a majority Protestant nation. It gave the president authority to imprison and deport noncitizens during times of conflict, bypassing normal removal processes.
Before this week, the act had been invoked just three times: during the War of 1812, World War I and most recently World War II, when it was used in the infamous mass internment of people of German, Italian and especially Japanese heritage.
According to the CLINIC statement, the law has historically “led to serious rights abuses,” noting its use to detain Japanese residents and Japanese Americans during World War II. Two-thirds of the 120,000 people of Japanese descent rounded up into camps by the U.S. government under the law were native-born U.S. citizens.
El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele confirmed on social media that 238 alleged members of Tren de Aragua, along with 23 members of the international MS-13 gang, had been delivered to the Salvadoran prison system. The men were not identified, and their status is uncertain.
Mr. Wheeler worries that the mass deportation represents “a one-way ticket.” It is not clear how the deported men can argue their innocence or extricate themselves from the Salvadoran prison system.
The vast mega-prison where the men are being held was constructed by the Bukele administration as part of its campaign against gang violence in El Salvador. Authorized under years of “temporary” emergency powers granted to Mr. Bukele, the effort has succeeded in reducing crime but has included the imprisonment of more than 120,000 Salvadorans—85,000 without warrants—the highest incarceration rate in the world. Human rights advocates allege that significant abuses have occurred inside the facility.
Like the men rounded up for deportation in the United States, many Salvadorans complain that how men were dressed or the tattoos on their bodies seemed to be the primary criteria for their incarceration under the “state of exception” declared by Mr. Bukele.
Mr. Wheeler retains some hope that federal court orders could yet address the treatment of these recent deportees and perhaps bar future overextension of executive power. “Fortunately, we have that third branch of government called the judiciary that is really what’s holding us back from this monarchy that Trump wants,” he said.
“You’re going to take this up to the court of appeals and then ultimately the Supreme Court will decide this issue. But it’s not out of the realm [of possibility] to think that the order could be enforced still and bring these people back,” he said.
“People who have been removed illegally are routinely ordered back into the United States. I have never seen this volume of people [returned], but that’s a common remedy.”
With reporting from The Associated Press and O.S.V. News Service
The Weekly Dispatch takes a deep dive into breaking events and issues of significance around our world and our nation today, providing the background readers need to make better sense of the headlines speeding past us each week. For more news and analysis from around the world, visit Dispatches.
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