Trump Deported Venezuelans Who Aren’t Gang Members, Lawyers Say
(Bloomberg) -- Not all of the hundreds of Venezuelans deported last weekend by the Trump administration are gang members, according to lawyers challenging the US move that whisked them out of the country.
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President Donald Trump went after members of the Tren de Aragua gang through a March 15 proclamation that referred to “alien enemies” who are “conducting irregular warfare and undertaking hostile actions” against the US at the direction of the Venezuelan government.
But several people among the three planeloads of Venezuelans sent to a notorious prison in El Salvador were wrongly targeted as gang members, their lawyers said in a filing Wednesday in Washington federal court. In addition, five men who sued and had their deportations blocked by a judge also aren’t members of a gang, their lawyers argued.
In his proclamation, Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, under which the president can detain or deport citizens of an enemy nation. White House border czar Tom Homan said this week that 238 Tren de Aragua members were deported. The White House says 137 of them were deported under the act.
Not Gang Members
Whatever the legal basis used for their deportation, however, the lawyers say their clients simply aren’t gang members. One of the men deported is Jerce Reyes Barrios, 36, a professional soccer player from Venezuela who has no criminal record or gang ties, according to a declaration by his lawyer, Linette Tobin. She said he fled to the US last year and applied for asylum after marching in protest of President Nicolas Maduro’s government.
Barrios was picked up by US immigration authorities in a raid this month and accused of being a gang member. Tobin said the authorities gave two reasons. He had a tattoo, which she said is a crown sitting on top of a soccer ball circled by a Catholic rosary and the word Dios, or God. And a social media post shows what authorities said was him flashing gang signals. Tobin said he was using sign language to say “I love you” and “Rock & Roll.”
White House spokesman Kush Desai disputed the allegations.
“The Trump administration is committed to delivering on President Trump’s mandate to mass deport criminal illegal migrants, enforce our immigration laws and secure our borders,” he said in a statement.
The Justice Department didn’t immediately comment.
The filing came just before midnight as US District Judge James Boasberg prepares for a hearing Friday on the case. Trump, without referring to Boasberg by name, called for his impeachment and said in a social media post that he’s a “Radical Left Lunatic of a Judge, a troublemaker and agitator.” That prompted US Chief Justice John Roberts to say the impeachment of US judges is “not an appropriate response” to disputing their rulings.
The five men who sued are represented by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Democracy Forward Foundation. Their filing argued that the Alien Enemies Act can be used only when the US has declared war on a nation, and that it hasn’t done so with Venezuela. They also claim the Venezuelans have been given no chance to challenge the US declaration that they are gang members.
‘Implements of Torture’
The filing says the lawyers don’t have “names or information” about most of the people the administration flew to El Salvador. The attorneys also claim the Salvadoran prison where those deported are being held is notorious for human rights abuses.
“Prison officials engage in widespread physical abuse, including waterboarding, electric shocks, using implements of torture on detainees’ fingers, forcing detainees into ice water for hours, and hitting or kicking detainees so severely that it causes broken bones or ruptured organs,” according to the filing. “Salvador creates these horrific conditions intentionally to terrify people.”
El Salvador government officials have dismissed allegations of human rights abuses in the country’s prisons.
The case is in the spotlight after Boasberg’s efforts to block the deportations and pin down the facts led to a showdown with the Justice Department, sparking Trump’s call to impeach him and, in turn, the chief justice’s rebuke of the president. Boasberg and the Trump administration are at odds over whether the US defied his March 15 ruling temporarily blocking further use of the Alien Enemies Act to remove alleged gang members.
The US has asked a federal appeals court to take Boasberg off the case, saying his questioning is “flagrantly improper” and presents “grave risks.”
“All five of the named plaintiffs dispute that they are members of the TdA,” or Tren de Aragua, according to the filing. One of the men “was accused of gang membership apparently as a result of attending a party with a friend, where he knew no one else, based on the government’s claim that TdA members had been present.”
Another is a tattoo artist who was questioned about his tattoos “as the apparent basis for TdA membership,” the lawyer wrote. “Those tattoos are from a Google image search that turned up an eyeball design that he thought ‘looked cool.’”
The case is J.G.G. v. Trump, 25-cv-766, US District Court, District of Columbia (Washington).
--With assistance from Jordan Fabian, Chris Strohm and Jef Feeley.
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