Lawyers Seek Return of Migrants Deported Under Wartime Act

Over the past two weeks, immigration lawyers, scrambling from courthouse to courthouse, have secured provisional orders in five states stopping the Trump administration from using the Alien Enemies Act, an 18th-century wartime law, to deport Venezuelans accused of being gang members to a terrorism prison in El Salvador.

Judges have been harsh in appraising how the White House has used the powerful statute. “Cows have better treatment now under the law,” a federal judge in Manhattan said on Tuesday.

But at least so far, the one thing the lawyers have not managed to do is protect another — and harder to reach — group of Venezuelan migrants: about 140 men who are already in El Salvador, having been deported there under the act more than a month ago.

Early Friday, the American Civil Liberties Union took another shot at seeking due process for those men. Lawyers for the group filed an updated version of a lawsuit they brought against President Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act on March 15, the first that challenged his invocation of the law.

This time, the A.C.L.U. is asking a federal judge in Washington not to stop the men from being sent to El Salvador, but rather to help them return to U.S. soil.

When the A.C.L.U. filed its initial version of the suit, in Federal District Court in Washington, Judge James E. Boasberg issued an immediate order telling the administration to hold off sending any planes of Venezuelans to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act and to turn around any flights that were already in the air.