SCOTUS on notice

U.S. District Court Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr. is the first judge to rule that the Alien Enemies Act cannot be used against people who, the Republican administration claims, are gang members invading the United States. Rodriguez said he wouldn't interfere with the government's right to deport people in the country illegally through other means, but it could not rely on the 227-year-old law to do so.

“Neither the Court nor the parties question that the Executive Branch can direct the detention and removal of aliens who engage in criminal activity in the United States,” wrote Rodriguez, who was nominated by Trump in 2018. But, the judge said, "the President’s invocation of the AEA through the Proclamation exceeds the scope of the statute and is contrary to the plain, ordinary meaning of the statute’s terms.”

  Atlanta Journal Consitution

Countdown to Trump and his acolytes calling for Judge Rodriguez to be impeached.

If the administration appeals, it would go first to the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. That is among the nation’s most conservative appeals courts and it also has ruled against what it saw as overreach on immigration matters by both the Obama and Biden administrations.

UPDATE 05/02/2025:

This particular case concerns individuals who are detained in that district—so in the Southern District of Texas. And that’s significant, and partially a result of the fact that the Supreme Court held that these challenges to the Alien Enemies Act had to proceed via habeas petitions. And so it’s in part because of that procedural posture that the district court said this ruling just applies to individuals who are being detained in the jurisdiction.

Of course, the Southern District of Texas is not the only place where the administration is detaining people and from where it might try to then summarily expel them to El Salvador. There’s still a ton of moving parts in this litigation. Another district court in the District of Colorado also concluded that individuals who were detained there could not be expelled under the Alien Enemies Act because the administration’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act was illegal. There are a few other temporary restraining orders that are in place: one in New York, another in the District of Massachusetts.

[...]

So it’s very possible we will soon get rulings from those judges that review the underlying merits about whether the administration can use the Alien Enemies Act at all in those jurisdiction, at least as applied to those individuals subject to the proclamation. But because the district judge issued a preliminary injunction, in this case the government can appeal that to the Fifth Circuit.

[...]

And so it’s possible this case will get up to the U.S. Supreme Court shadow docket rather quickly just as a request to stay that is put on hold this preliminary injunction ruling.

[...]

Again, there are so many different immigration detention facilities that the government still has the power to shuffle people around a fair amount. Some of the most recent horrifying expulsions we read about were carried out from Louisiana; those were the instances where the administration sent U.S. citizens to Honduras. But this is just the patchwork landscape that the Supreme Court has created.

[...]

I worry that people will give the Supreme Court a little bit too much credit for ruling against the Trump administration in a few cases as that administration’s popularity just plummets and ignore the ways in which the Supreme Court is furthering the administration’s ideological agenda in other cases and the ways in which they paved the way for the Trump administration in the first place.

[...]

[W]here did the president get this crazy idea that he is above the law and has unreviewable authority? He got it from his daddy Chief Justice Roberts and all of those guys.

[...]

[This] is one of the first cases that actually rules on whether the administration can use the Alien Enemies Act for this group of people at all. Thus far, the vast, vast majority of the rulings on these matters—again, except for that District of Colorado ruling—have been such preliminary relief that the district courts have not yet had occasion to really examine the underlying merits of the claims, that the administration just can’t use the Alien Enemies Act for this reason at all.

[...]

Donald Trump is basically invoking this idea of emergencies and exceptions to assert extraordinary powers. Here, he’s basically claiming there is a foreign invasion and incursion, therefore [he] can use this summary removal deportation procedure to remove and expel people under other processes that are basically less burdensome on the executive branch. In the cases of tariffs, he’s arguing there is some fentanyl crisis that warrants basically crashing the U.S. economy and the global economy. So there are a host of instances where he’s basically saying, There are emergencies that give me extraordinary powers, therefore no one can examine my powers. And this is just one example. And so it is heartening to have a district judge saying, Actually, that’s not how this works.

  New Republic