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A federal judge in Pennsylvania ruled Tuesday that President Donald Trump may use a wartime law to fast-track deportations of accused gang members but said authorities must give targeted migrants at least 21 days' notice and an opportunity to challenge their removals.
The decision from U.S. District Judge Stephanie L. Haines is the first ruling to back the Trump administration's interpretation of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, which it has invoked to deport alleged members of the Tren de Aragua gang. The law has been invoked only when the nation was at war.
At the same time, Haines, who was nominated to the bench by Trump during his first term in the White House, described the administration's process of notifying migrants that they have been targeted for deportation under the act as "constitutionally deficient."
Trump's push to use the Alien Enemies Act has emerged as one of the most controversial parts of his deportation agenda, drawing a series of legal challenges and an order from the Supreme Court last month that temporarily paused such removals in one court district in Texas.
The Trump administration has not announced any Alien Enemies Act deportations since the middle of March, when the rushed removal of more than 130 Venezuelans to a megaprison in El Salvador launched the first court battles. Haines's ruling opens the door for such deportations to continue in her western Pennsylvania court district, which includes the Moshannon Valley Processing Center, the largest immigration detention center in the Northeast.
Judges in Texas, Colorado and New York separately have issued orders blocking Alien Enemies Act deportations in their jurisdictions, finding that the law was meant to deter wars or "predatory incursions," not to target undocumented immigrants - even those accused of memberships in gangs that Trump has declared foreign terror organizations.
Haines disagreed, writing that the Alien Enemies Act "does not require an ‘invasion or predatory incursion' to be 'perpetrated, attempted or threatened against the territory of the United States by the military of any foreign nation or government.'"
"The proclamation and the declarations that respondents have submitted to this Court indicate that there is a factual basis for President Trump's conclusions in the Proclamation," Haines wrote. That proclamation references the secretary of state's designation of Tren de Aragua as a foreign terrorist organization, which Haines said "heavily supports the conclusions" that the gang is a "cohesive group united by a common goal of causing significant disruption to the public safety of the United States."
However, she rejected government assertions that it must only provide targeted migrants 24 hours' notice of their designations as "alien enemies" before it could summarily deport them.
In addition to requiring 21 days' notice, Haines said Tuesday that the notice must be provided in a language the migrant understands.
Attorneys with the ACLU - which represented the 30-year-old Venezuelan detainee who was the named plaintiff in the case - said they intend to appeal.
"The Alien Enemies Act is a wartime authority that was not intended to cover migration or ordinary criminal activity," said Lee Gelernt, the lead ACLU attorney on Alien Enemies Act cases. "The court properly rejected the government's argument that they can remove people with only 12 hours' notice."
Attorneys for the government and the ACLU have pushed the U.S. Supreme Court to clarify how much notice migrants must be given nationwide before they can be removed under the act, and to determine the legality of Trump's use of the law.
U.S. intelligence agencies concluded last month that the Venezuelan government is not directing an invasion of the United States by Tren de Aragua, contradicting Trump's justification for invoking the Alien Enemies Act to deport alleged members.
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