Sparks flew during a closely-watched federal appeals court hearing Monday afternoon — with a Barack Obama-appointed judge tearing into the Trump administration’s plans to mass-deport alleged members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.
Judge Patricia Millett, a member of the bench since 2013, dominated much of the questioning — grilling a Justice Department lawyer over due process concerns for the 260 purported illegal migrants shipped to a notorious El Salvador prison earlier this month under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act.
“There were planeloads of people. There were no procedures in place to notify people,” Millett exclaimed at one point. “Nazis got better treatment under the Alien Enemies Act than has happened here.”
“There’s no regulations, and nothing was adopted by the agency officials that were administering this. The people weren’t given notice,” she added. “They weren’t told where they were going. They were given [to] those people on those planes on that Saturday and had no opportunity to file [for] habeas [corpus].”
The Trump administration had asked the appeals court to intervene and stay DC US District Judge James Boasberg’s ruling that imposed a 14-day restraining order against the president’s use of the 18th-century law to fly migrants suspected of ties to Tren de Aragua to central America.
“We certainly dispute the Nazi analogy,” shot back deputy assistant attorney general Drew Ensign, defending the Trump administration, shot back. “But more importantly, the fact is that individual plaintiffs were able to file habeas in time in order to secure relief the five individual plaintiffs.”
Millett responded that “it just feels like there was no time” told Ensign the habeus corpus cases — used to challenge wrongful detentions — “were only able to be filed because the district court froze things.”
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