Trump invokes Alien Enemies Act of 1798
March 17, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump invoked an 18th century wartime law to deport alleged members of the Venezuelan criminal gang Tren de Aragua, on Friday. The U.S. government then deported more than 250 alleged gang members, most Venezuelan, to El Salvador, despite a U.S. judge’s order temporarily barring deportations under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 and ordering officials to recall any planes that had already departed under that measure. (Associated Press)
Flights were in the air at the time of the ruling. “Oopsie … Too late,” posted El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele online in response the the U.S. judge’s order, followed by a laughing emoji. (AFP)
The Trump administration said it ignored the order because the two planes carrying deportees were over international waters at the time of the ruling, which officials said therefore didn’t apply, reports Axios.
Bukele shared images of a planeload of men arriving in El Salvador, where they were sent to the 40,000-person capacity “terrorism confinement center,” where they were forced to kneel and have their heads shaved. Bukele said El Salvador will charge a “small” fee to the U.S. for housing the deportees. Trump’s administration will pay El Salvador $6 million to imprison the deportees for one year, reports the Associated Press.
Soon after Bukele’s statement, the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, thanked El Salvador’s leader. “Thank you for your assistance and friendship, President Bukele,” he wrote on social media. (Guardian)
Announcing the executive order based on the Alien Enemies Act — last used to intern Japanese-Americans, Germans and Italians during WWII and previously only invoked in times of war — Trump accused Venezuela’s Maduro government of using gang members to cause harm inside the United States, announced that all Tren de Aragua members in the United States who are 14 or older and are not citizens or lawful permanent residents will be liable to be “apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed as Alien Enemies.” (Miami Herald)
The Trump administration has not identified the immigrants deported, provided any evidence they are in fact members of Tren de Aragua or that they committed any crimes in the United States. It also sent two top members of the Salvadoran MS-13 gang to El Salvador who had been arrested in the United States, reports the Associated Press.
It is not the first time Trump has raised the specter of transnational gangs in order to justify a migrant crackdown. During Trump’s first presidency he claimed members of the MS-13 street gang represented a growing threat, despite evidence that its presence in the U.S. remained marginal.
A Venezuelan couple living in Washington DC, who had been granted Temporary Protected Status, was arrested in front of their young children a week ago — accused of links with Tren de Aragua. They have since been released, but the episode “raised alarms that the Trump administration is again willing to separate parents and children,” reports the Washington Post.
“Experts said that in a vast majority of cases, Venezuelans and other migrants in the U.S. are not members of the gang but are fleeing the very crime those gangs are carrying out in their home countries,” reports the Washington Post. “U.S. criminal justice data show that undocumented immigrants in the United States commit crimes at a lower rate than U.S. citizens do. And the country has a history of using flimsy evidence for arresting someone on suspicion of gang affiliation, they said.”
Trump has claimed that people sent to Guantánamo Bay were gang members, but external reviews of the migrants sent in early February to the U.S. military base found no evidence of gang links, reports the Washington Post.
More Tren de Aragua
“Our research in Venezuela, and our colleagues’ research in other countries, suggests that incarceration and mass deportations of Venezuelans living in the U.S., whether they have ties to the group or not, will likely strengthen Tren de Aragua rather than cripple it,” wrote sociologists Verónica Zubillaga and Rebecca Hanson earlier this month in the Conversation.
More Migration
The Trump administration’s measures against migration — which “many critics, especially those on the left, have long considered politically unpalatable, legally untenable and ultimately ineffective because they don’t tackle the root causes of migration” — have consolidated a reduction in migration under former President Joe Biden. Illegal border crossings are down, migrants shelters on the border are empty, and people stranded in Mexico are returning home, reports the New York Times.
The U.S. military deployed a Navy destroyer to bolster security at the southern U.S. border, “dispatching a warship involved last year in combat in the Middle East to waters typically patrolled by the U.S. Coast Guard,” reports the Washington Post.
Nine Haitians, a powerful labor union and a Protestant group are suing Trump over his decision to cut short more than a half-million Haitians’ legal immigration protections in the United States by six months, saying the move was driven by the U.S. president’s “racial animus towards non-white immigrants,” reports the Miami Herald.
A draft of a new U.S. travel ban would put Venezuelan and Cuban citizens prohibited from traveling to the U.S. (New York Times)
“At a time when legal pathways to the U.S. have been slashed and criminal groups are raking in money from migrant smuggling, social media apps like TikTok have become an essential tool for smugglers and migrants alike. The videos — taken to cartoonish extremes — offer a rare look inside a long elusive industry and the narratives used by trafficking networks to fuel migration north,” reports the Associated Press.
Guatemala’s efforts to receive and reintegrate deportees from the US are being challenged by Trump’s rhetoric that deportees are criminals, reports Bloomberg, highlighting government reintegration initiatives, including job matching programs. (Via Americas Migration Brief)
Brazil
Thousands of backers of Brazil’s former President Jair Bolsonaro poured onto Copacabana Beach on Sunday to express their support for the far-right politician as he faces charges he plotted a coup, reports the Associated Press.
Bolsonaro told supporters in Rio de Janeiro that a ban on him seeking re-election next year amounted to a "denial of democracy." (AFP)
Charges against the former army captain and several key allies will go before a five-judge panel at Brazil's Supreme Court on March 25. If judges agree to hear the trial, Bolsonaro a defendant in a case that accuses him leading a plot to topple the government and undermine the country's democracy after he lost a 2022 election, reports Reuters.
Brazil plans to launch an ambitious $125 billion fund to protect tropical forests when it hosts the COP30 climate summit this November. The investment vehicle is part of a broad strategy to turn the talks into action, reports Bloomberg.
Panama
China has sent a senior-level delegation to Panama at a time when relations have been clouded by developments surrounding the Panama Canal. Observers say the move is an attempt to “understand what is unfolding” and possibly reverse the situation, reports the South China Morning Post.
Chile
The global rise of the far right is partly a consequence of the left’s failures, Chilean President Gabriel Boric told EFE.
Haiti
Haiti’s powerful gang coalition, Viv Ansanm, attacked several media outlets over the past week, in the midst of violence around Port-au-Prince that included the burning of schools, the looting of businesses and escalating panic in Haiti’s capital, reports the Miami Herald.
Mexico
The horrific details of a drug cartel “extermination camp” in Mexico’s Jalisco state, used as a killing site where criminals routinely disposed of their victims, has put a spotlight back on illegal organizations in the country. (See Friday’s briefs.) Activists that uncovered the site — after government authorities failed to detect — said that several people had contacted the group to say that they had been recruited and trained at the ranch in the use of weapons and torture techniques, reports the New York Times.
Half of all Mexican exports to the US last year did not arrive under North America’s free trade deal and therefore still face an immediate risk of 25 per cent tariffs imposed by Trump, reports the Financial Times.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum’s cool-headed responses to Trump’s tariff threats have earned her his respect, and defied expectations that she would govern in the shadow of her predecessor, I write in Cenital.
Sheinbaum said today that an old phone and email of hers were hacked, reports Reuters.
Ecuador
Ecuador's security forces will "very soon" receive advice from Erik Prince, the private security executive, on fighting criminal gangs that are attempting to increase violence ahead of an April presidential runoff vote, Interior Minister John Reimberg said. (Reuters)
Ecuadorean officials have told Trump allies that they are interested in hosting a U.S. military base, reports Reuters.
Cuba
Electricity service in Cuba was gradually restored yesterday, more than 36 hours after a substation failure left the entire island in the dark, reports the Associated Press.
Regional Relations
Trump’s foreign aid freeze had stopped crucial anti-narcotics programs in Latin America, including its Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, reports the Washington Post.
Critter Corner
In Puerto Jofre, in Brazil’s Pantanal wetlands, “beginning about 20 years ago — after decades of hunting, poaching for skins and retaliation for the occasional loss of livestock, all of which drove jaguars into hiding — a combination of government protection, a rise in tourism and early eco-tourism projects resulted in an increasingly friendly relationship between humans and jaguars,” reports the New York Times.