El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele earned thanks from President Donald Trump for receiving 261 deportees from the U.S., including members of the Venezuelan criminal organization Tren de Aragua, into his country’s prison system. In a cinematic montage shared on social media Sunday, deportees are pushed around all the way from plane to cell. 

The viral clip came a day after Trump issued a proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 against the notorious Venezuelan gang. The law grants the president the authority to detain or deport non-citizens from enemy nations during times of declared war or invasion, based solely on their nationality and without the need for a hearing.

Critics suggest that applying the law to the current context is unprecedented, raising concerns about due process and the potential misuse of presidential powers. Furthermore, District Judge James Boasberg’s order to halt the deportation flights, which the administration claims came after planes departed to El Salvador, has led to accusations that the judge is abusing his authority and should be impeached, a proposition that provoked rare public pushback from Chief Justice John Roberts.

Responding to criticisms of the president’s decision, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a letter, 

The written order and the administration’s actions do not conflict. Moreover, as the Supreme Court has repeatedly made clear—federal courts generally have no jurisdiction over the President’s conduct of foreign affairs, his authorities under the Alien Enemies Act, and his core Article II powers to remove foreign alien terrorists from U.S. soil and repel a declared invasion.

“A single judge in a single city cannot direct the movements of an aircraft carrier full of foreign alien terrorists who were physically expelled from U.S. soil,” Leavitt added.

Luis Atencio, a Venezuelan-American political analyst in South Florida, commented to The American Conservative, “We cannot celebrate the deportations of those who we cannot confirm are criminals."

“Is this administration looking to actually improve the perception of public safety or are they looking to get a viral video?” Atencio asked. “The presence of non-criminal, non-TdA individuals being deported leaves many questions and doubts. A president who violates due process for anyone, anywhere is proving to disregard the Fifth and 14th Amendments of the Constitution.”

“As this situation progresses we have already been able to confirm that Francisco Javier García, has been unduly categorized as a TdA member and is in El Salvador,” Atencio added. “He is a barber with a clean record both in the U.S. and Venezuela and has been deported to a maximum security prison for criminals because he had tattoos. This is not the ‘border protection’ anyone is looking for.”

To this particular critique, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has responded by saying in an interview with Fox News’ Guy Benson: 

First of all, I would say that every single person that was on that plane was in the country illegally, one way or the other [...] Now, assuming—let’s just assume—and I’m not saying this is the case, because I think there’s high fidelity and confidence that in fact that’s exactly what every single one of them was—but if one of them turns out not to be, then they’re just illegally in our country and the Salvadorans can then deport them to Venezuela. But they weren’t supposed to be in our country to begin with. They were here illegally. They were all here illegally, all the people that are on that list.

Daniel DiMartino, a Manhattan Institute fellow who focuses on high-skilled migration, commented, “It’s a great cost-saving measure to send non-citizen criminals to El Salvador, since imprisonment is much costlier in the U.S."

“My great concern is that under the Alien Enemies Act, any Venezuelan can be accused without evidence of being a gang member and deported to a foreign prison. We don’t need the use of this law to remove criminals, we can use the current process Trump has been using until now,” DiMartino said. 

Defenders of the president’s actions, like Simon Hankinson, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Border Security and Immigration Center, argue that unprecedented abuse justifies unprecedented answers.

“President Trump made a promise to stop mass illegal immigration, to seal the borders and enforce immigration laws. What we’ve seen these past two months has been the use of every legal possibility to come through on that promise,” Hankinson said. 

“I’m keeping a spreadsheet going with all of the lawsuits the president is facing. This seems to be the new dynamic over the past two administrations—the president makes bold moves with the expectation that they will be litigated. Luckily, we have the rule of law and the Supreme Court. We need to have the lines drawn clearly.”

When asked about whether Trump’s invocation of a centuries-old law could prove problematic, Hankinson explained, “in history everything happens once for the first time… We have seen unprecedented abuses [of immigration law] that justify unprecedented answers.

“I’m a little concerned about these fairly low-level judges making sweeping orders that claim to bind the executive,” Hankinson added. “This is just counterproductive; you’d think higher courts would have more of a role here.”

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To concerns raised about the potential for imprisoning those who are not gang members, Hankinson told TAC, “For some people there are no deportable aliens. They don’t want to deport anyone under any circumstance. The process for deporting people is often not very quick and it often drags forever with appeals. I’m not sure what exactly happened in this case, but I’d caution against assuming that authorities did not make sure deportees were deportable.”

To the question of whether the Tren de Aragua threat has been exaggerated, Hankinson asked me, as Border Czar Tom Homan often does, “What is the price of a human life?”

“How many girls like Jocelyn Nungaray and Laken Riley have to be killed before it is a problem? Is it one, five, 10? How many people have to be robbed of their possessions?” Hankinson continued. “If it’s a preventable problem, it should be addressed. The question of how big of a threat it is matters less to me than the fact that we can stop it. If we can, we should, but we decided not to in the recent past.”