The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Friday to allow it to use a rarely invoked wartime law to continue to deport Venezuelans with little to no due process.
The emergency application arrived at the court after a federal appeals court kept in place a temporary block on the deportations. In its application to the Supreme Court, lawyers for the administration argued that the matter was too urgent to wait for the case to wind its way through the lower courts.
In the government’s application, acting Solicitor General Sarah M. Harris said the case presented “fundamental questions about who decides how to conduct sensitive national-security-related operations in this country.”
“The Constitution supplies a clear answer: the president,” Ms. Harris wrote. “The Republic cannot afford a different choice.”
The justices set a speedy briefing schedule for the case, asking that lawyers for the immigrants file a response to the government’s application by 10 a.m. on April 1.
The case will offer a major early test for how the nation’s highest court will confront President Trump’s aggressive efforts to deport millions of migrants and his hostile posture toward the courts. Mr. Trump has called for impeaching a lower-court judge who paused the deportations.
The case hinges on the legality of an executive order signed by Mr. Trump that invokes the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. The order uses the law to target people believed to be Venezuelan gang members in the United States.
The Alien Enemies Act allows for summary deportations of people who come from countries at war with the United States. The statute, which is best known for being used in the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, grants the government broad latitude during a time of declared war or invasion to remove any subjects of a “hostile nation” who are 14 or older as “alien enemies.”
The dispute was set in motion in early February, when Secretary of State Marco Rubio designated Tren de Aragua, a violent Venezuelan street gang, as a foreign terrorist organization.
On March 14, Mr. Trump signed an executive order invoking the act to rapidly arrest and deport people identified by the administration as members of the gang.
In the government’s application, Ms. Harris wrote that the president had “determined that thousands of members of this designated foreign terrorist organization have illegally ‘infiltrated’ the country” as part of a plan by the Venezuelan government to destabilize democracies.
Judge James E. Boasberg of Federal District Court in Washington then issued a temporary restraining order blocking the government from deporting any Venezuelan immigrants under the law. The judge ordered that any flights that had left the country with the immigrants under the executive order return to the United States “however that’s accomplished — whether turning around the plane or not.”
However, dozens of people were put on planes and sent to a prison in El Salvador without many of the legal protections in place under federal immigration law.
The Trump administration has revealed little about how it determined who belonged to the gang, and the government’s application stated only that “the administration detained designated” gang members “identified through a rigorous process.”
Administration officials have not given a clear timeline for when the flights landed in El Salvador, but White House officials have said the migrants “had already been removed from U.S. territory” at the time of the judge’s order.
The emergency application did not add clarity to that timeline, stating only that the removal of the immigrants “marked the culmination of weeks of work by President Trump and his cabinet.”
“As with many sensitive diplomatic and national-security operations, speed was of the essence,” the government brief read.
By a 2-to-1 vote, a panel of federal judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit had kept in place Judge Boasberg’s pause on the deportations in a decision issued on March 26. One of the judges who voted to maintain the temporary pause, Patricia A. Millett, wrote that the government’s deportations denied the immigrants “even a gossamer thread of due process.”
In its application, the Trump administration argued that the appeals court decision “cries out for this court’s intervention,” asserting that lawyers for the detained immigrants “brought the wrong claims in the wrong court.”
Lawyers for the government argued that under the Alien Enemies Act, detentions and removals are “so bound up with critical national-security judgments that they are barely amenable to judicial review at all.” They also claimed that the immigrants were required to bring their challenges in Texas, where they had previously been held, rather than in Washington.
The Trump administration claimed that the trial court’s temporary pause on such deportations “rebuffed the president’s judgments as to how to protect the nation against foreign terrorist organizations and risk debilitating effects for delicate foreign negotiations.”
The government argued that people involved in Tren de Aragua should be subject to deportation as subjects of a hostile nation because they were closely aligned with the Venezuelan government and the leadership of the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro. The Trump administration has also argued that their arrival in the United States constitutes an invasion under the act.
It remains unclear what evidence the government has relied on to determine that those sent to El Salvador are Venezuelan gang members. Thus far, the administration has refused to provide names or details about those removed.
The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told reporters that the Trump administration would not “reveal operational details about a counterterrorism operation.” Lawyers for the administration told a federal judge that it would not disclose further information about the flights to Venezuela. Doing so, the lawyers said, would jeopardize state secrets.
In court filings, lawyers for at least five of the people flown to a prison in El Salvador pushed back against claims they were tied to the gang. They accused the government of relying at least in part on tattoos that federal agents believed to signify gang ties, and they disputed that their clients were gang members.
The lawyers said one man got his tattoo because it resembled the logo of his favorite soccer team. Another got a tattoo to honor his grandmother. A third immigrant’s sister gave a sworn declaration that her brother’s tattoo — a rose with paper money as its petals — had no connection to a gang.
