U.S. courts have historically issued orders that apply even outside the United States, when someone is alleged to be doing something illegal overseas. In New Jersey v. City of New York (1931), the Supreme Court ruled that federal courts can issue an injunction against a defendant ordering it not to dump garbage in the ocean beyond the waters of the United States. “It has been settled since the middle of the eighteenth century that” injunctions have “extraterritorial reach. The classic case is Penn v. Lord Baltimore [1750]…A widely cited case for the extraterritorial reach of” court “decrees is The Salton Sea Cases, 172 F. 792 (9th Cir. 1909), where actions in Mexico were enjoined because they were damaging property within the United States.”
But the Justice Department is apparently now arguing that a federal judge’s order against certain deportations did not apply to flights by the Department of Homeland Security that were already outside the United States at the time of the judge’s order. Those flights were carrying suspected members of the violent Venezuelan criminal gang Tren de Aragua to El Salvador, where they are now being held in El Salvador’s mega-jail.
“In a court filing on Sunday, Department of Justice lawyers said the order had not applied because the deportees ‘had already been removed from United States territory.'” That argument is mistaken, because, as I noted above, U.S. court orders can apply even outside United States territory. If the Trump administration had a problem with the judge’s order, it was supposed to appeal his decision, not flout the judge’s order, according to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Walker v. City of Birmingham (1967), which says that even legally erroneous court orders must generally be complied with until they are overturned by a higher court.
The BBC reports:
US President Donald Trump announced on Saturday that he had signed a proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 as he accused Tren de Aragua of “perpetrating, attempting, and threatening an invasion or predatory incursion against the territory of the United States”.
He said members of the gang would be deported for engaging in “irregular warfare” against the US. The act… is a broad law that allows the detention and deportation of natives or citizens of an “enemy” nation without the usual processes.
On Saturday evening, US District Judge James Boasberg in Washington DC ordered a 14-day halt to deportations covered by Trump’s proclamation, pending further legal arguments.
After lawyers told him that planes with deportees had already taken off, Judge Boasberg gave a verbal order for the flights to turn back, US media reported, although that directive did not form part of his written ruling.
The written notice appeared in the case docket at 19:25 EDT on Saturday…although it is unclear when the flights carrying the alleged gang members departed from the US.
In a court filing on Sunday, Department of Justice lawyers said the order had not applied because the deportees “had already been removed from United States territory”.
A senior administration official told CBS News, the BBC’s US partner, that 261 people were deported on Saturday, 137 of whom were removed under the Alien Enemies Act over alleged gang ties.
The justice department has appealed against the judge’s ruling.
President Bukele, a Trump ally, wrote that the detainees were immediately transferred to El Salvador’s notorious mega-jail, the Terrorism Confinement Center (Cecot).
