Attorney Alan Dershowitz said Tuesday that President Donald Trump and Congress had multiple options to rein in the judge who
Attorney Alan Dershowitz said Tuesday that President Donald Trump and Congress had multiple options to rein in the judge who tried to block the deportation of over 200 members of the Tren de Aragua (TdA) prison gang.
United States District Judge James Boasberg of the District of Columbia issued an injunction Saturday ordering the Trump administration to turn around two planes carrying members of the gang to El Salvador. This, after Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to speed up the deportation of the gang members. After providing background information Dershowitz said that the language of the legislation Trump invoked might give Boasberg room to halt deportations, but Trump had multiple options to not only kick TdA members out of the country, since many of them had “no papers whatsoever,” but also to rein in Boasberg.
“What I don’t understand, maybe my listeners can explain it to me, is why the administration invoked this Alien 1798 French exclusion law that requires that there be either an invasion or declared war,” Dershowitz said. “There has been declared war or an invasion by a foreign country. Which one? Venezuela? I don’t know. Venezuela certainly is complicit. It’s a complicated law, and when they invoked the law they gave this judge, the chief judge of the D.C. Circuit, the ability to say, ‘Wait a minute you’ve invoked the law. Let me look at the law. Well, the law says it has to be done pursuant to a foreign country. I don’t see that, so I’m going to issue a status. You came to me with that statute.
