A coalition of immigrants rights organizations and criminal defense lawyers sued the Trump administration Thursday to block the government from paying El Salvador to imprison hundreds of Venezuelan migrants who were removed from the U.S. earlier this year without due process.
Over 200 men were removed from the U.S. and transferred to a notorious Salvadoran mega-prison under the Alien Enemies Act (AEA), a rarely used wartime law Trump invoked earlier this year.
Trump’s invocation of the AEA applied to people the government claims were members of Tren de Aragua (TdA), a transnational criminal organization. However, the government denied those targeted the ability to challenge that designation.
Multiple investigations have found that a majority of the men removed by the Trump administration do not have criminal records either in the U.S. or Venezuela and never violated immigration laws. Many of them also have no relation to El Salvador.
The men are being held as part of a financial arrangement between the U.S. Department of State and El Salvador’s Trump-friendly President Nayib Bukele. Under the agreement, the U.S. paid El Salvador around $6 million to imprison the men for at least a year.
The plaintiffs, represented by Democracy Forward*, allege that the agreement violates the Administrative Procedure Act and is contrary to the Fifth, Sixth and Eighth Amendments to the Constitution.
Plaintiffs further allege that the agreement bypasses U.S. immigration law, defies international treaties against torture and has harmed their ability to provide representation to their clients.
“By abducting our clients and outsourcing their imprisonment to a facility known for committing torture and other human rights abuses, the U.S. government is deliberately violating the Constitution, ignoring our laws, and flouting its international human rights obligations,” Alvaro Huerta, director of litigation and advocacy at Immigrant Defenders Law Center, said in a statement.
On Wednesday, a federal judge overseeing a lawsuit against AEA removals ordered the government to help the men it sent to El Salvador to challenge their ongoing imprisonment. In keeping the men in the foreign prison, the judge said the Trump administration has attempted to create “a legal no man’s land.”
“Our legal tradition is wholly incompatible with the establishment of a network of overseas prisons, shielded from the Great Writ by the facade of foreign control, to which the Government routinely exports detainees without due process,” the judge wrote.
The men have been in legal limbo for months, unable to challenge their imprisonment in either U.S. or Salvadoran courts. They were still not granted an opportunity to do so even after the Supreme Court ruled on two separate occasions that those targeted by the AEA must be given due process.
“Disappearing people into foreign black sites is unAmerican. It is not immigration policy—it’s an abuse of power typical of autocratic regimes and a direct violation of the U.S. Constitution, federal law, and human rights,” Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, said in a statement.
“Our lawsuit makes clear: No president—past or present—can buy their way out of the Constitution to disappear people behind a paywall of impunity,” Perryman added.
*Democracy Docket Founder Marc Elias is the chair of Democracy Forward’s board.