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The court’s pause on a judge’s order came a day before the Trump administration was supposed to outline how to allow nearly 140 Venezuelans deported to El Salvador to challenge their expulsion.
June 10, 2025Updated 8:38 p.m. ET
A federal appeals court on Tuesday said the Trump administration did not have to comply for now with a judge’s order to give due process to scores of Venezuelan immigrants who were deported to El Salvador under a wartime law.
The ruling, by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, came one day before the administration was supposed to outline for a lower-court judge how to allow nearly 140 deported Venezuelans to challenge their expulsion. The men, accused of being members of a violent street gang called Tren de Aragua, are being held in a maximum-security Salvadoran prison.
The White House deported the men on March 15 on flights from a detention center in Texas, using a powerful but rarely invoked statute called the Alien Enemies Act. The law, which has been used on only three other occasions in U.S. history, is meant to be used in times of declared war or during an invasion by a foreign nation.
The ruling, by a three-judge panel of the appeals court, was not a final decision on the merits in the case, but simply an administrative pause to give the appellate judges more time to consider the validity of the underlying order.
The fight over the plight of the Venezuelan immigrants is merely one of the many bitter battles that have pitted courts across the country against an administration that is aggressively seeking to deport as many as immigrants as possible through methods that have repeatedly strained the boundaries of the law. Time and again, judges have settled on a similar bottom line, saying that the immigrants must be afforded basic due process rights before being expelled from the country.
The proceeding, which has been unfolding in front of Judge James E. Boasberg, the chief judge in Federal District Court in Washington, was one of the first deportation cases to reach the courts and remains one of the hardest fought. Judge Boasberg tried to stop the deportation flights carrying the Venezuelans shortly after they took off, but the administration went ahead anyway, prompting him to threaten Trump officials with contempt proceedings.
