But White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, without directly addressing the Supreme Court ruling, said in a post on X: “We live in a society where foreign alien terrorists have unlimited free legal representation. But Americans whose communities have been stolen from them are left without recourse. We are rebalancing the scales.”
The high court majority issued Saturday’s stay after American Civil Liberties Union lawyers filed urgent requests for immediate action in multiple courts, including the Supreme Court, after reporting that some of the men already had been loaded aboard buses and were told they were to be deported.
The ACLU said the administration was poised to deport the men using a 1798 law that historically has been employed only in wartime without affording them a realistic opportunity to contest their removal, as the Supreme Court had ordered.
“These men were in imminent danger of spending their lives in a horrific foreign prison without ever having had a chance to go to court. We are relieved that the Supreme Court has not permitted the administration to whisk them away the way others were just last month,” Lee Gelernt, the ACLU’s lead attorney in the case, said in a statement on Saturday.
In an audio recording posted on TikTok, several men said they were Venezuelans falsely accused of being gang members and held at Bluebonnet immigration detention center in Texas. They said they were taken to a regional airport late on Friday but then returned.
The recording has not been verified by Reuters. An earlier post on TikTok from the same account was cited in court filings on Friday.
More than 50 Venezuelans had been scheduled to be flown out of the country, presumably to El Salvador, from the immigration center, the New York Times cited two people with knowledge of the situation as saying.
Elected last year on a promise to crack down on migrants, Trump invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act in an attempt to swiftly deport accused members of Tren de Aragua, a criminal gang originating from Venezuelan prisons that his administration labels a terrorist group.
