Caracas [Venezuela], June 5: Hundreds of Venezuelans deported from the United States to El Salvador under an 18th-century wartime law must be given the chance to challenge their detentions, and the Trump administration must facilitate the legal challenges, a U.S. judge ruled on Wednesday.
U.S. District Judge James Boasberg stopped short of expressly ordering the Trump administration to bring the hundreds of Venezuelan migrants currently being held in a mega-prison in El Salvador back to the United States.
The judge gave the Trump administration one week to detail how it would facilitate the deportees' filing of legal challenges.
In his ruling, Boasberg wrote that the individuals were deported without adequate notice or the right to contest their removals.
"That process, which was improperly withheld, must now be afforded to them," Boasberg wrote. "Absent this relief, the government could snatch anyone off the street, turn him over to a foreign country, and then effectively foreclose any corrective course of action."
It was not immediately clear how the migrants would file the legal challenges, known as habeas corpus petitions, from within El Salvador's Terrorism Confinement Center.
The Venezuelans were deported in March after President Donald Trump, a Republican, invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to swiftly deport alleged members of the Tren de Aragua gang without going through normal immigration procedures.
Boasberg's Wednesday ruling is the first to address the fate of these detainees.
Neither the White House nor the Justice Department immediately responded to requests for comment.
Family members of many of the Venezuelans deported on March 15 and their lawyers deny the migrants had any gang ties, and say they were not given a chance to contest the Trump administration's allegations in court.
The Trump administration is paying President Nayib Bukele's government $6 million to hold them.
The U.S. Supreme Court in April held that migrants must be allowed to challenge their removals under the Alien Enemies Act. Courts around the country have since barred the Trump
administration from further deportations of alleged Tren de Aragua members under the law.
But those rulings only applied to Venezuelans still in the U.S. facing possible deportation under the law.
Source: Fijian Broadcasting Corporation