Lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union raced on Friday evening to stop the Trump administration from deporting a new group of Venezuelan migrants accused of being gang members under the expansive powers of a rarely invoked wartime law.
More than 50 Venezuelans were scheduled to be flown out of the country — presumably to El Salvador — from an immigration detention center in Anson, Texas, according to two people with knowledge of the situation. The A.C.L.U. in recent days has secured court orders barring similar deportations under the law, the Alien Enemies Act, in places including New York, Denver and Brownsville, Texas.
The situation in Anson was urgent enough that A.C.L.U. lawyers pressed their case in three different courts within five hours.
The lawyers started with an emergency filing in Federal District Court in Abilene, Texas, in which they claimed that officers at the Bluebonnet Detention Center in Anson had started distributing notices to Venezuelan immigrants informing them that they could face deportation as soon as Friday night.
They asked Judge James Wesley Hendrix, who is overseeing the case, to issue an immediate order protecting all migrants in the Northern District of Texas who might face deportation under the Alien Enemies Act. When Judge Hendrix did not grant their request quickly, the lawyers filed a similar request to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans.
The lawyers then filed an emergency petition to the Supreme Court, asking the justices to step in and issue an immediate pause on any deportations because many of the Venezuelan men had “already been loaded on to buses, presumably headed to the airport.”
