In the days since the federal government sent hundreds of Venezuelan immigrants to a prison in El Salvador, Washington has been debating whether the White House did indeed defy a federal judge who ordered the deportation flights to turn around and head back to the United States.
But beyond the Trump administration’s evident animus for the judge and the court, more basic questions remain unsettled and largely unanswered: Were the men who were expelled to El Salvador in fact all gang members, as the United States asserts, and how did the authorities make that determination about each of the roughly 200 people who were spirited out of the country even as a federal judge was weighing their fate?
The Trump White House has said that most of the immigrants deported were members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, which, like many transnational criminal organizations, has a presence in the United States. Amid the record numbers of migrants arriving at the southern border in recent years, the gang’s presence in some American cities became a rallying cry for Donald J. Trump as he campaigned to return to the White House, claiming immigrants were invading the country.
After Mr. Trump returned to power in January, Tren de Aragua remained a regular talking point for him and his immigration advisers, and the deportation flights last week were the administration’s most significant move yet to make good on its promise to go after the gang. But officials have disclosed little about how the men were identified as gang members and what due process, if any, they were accorded before being placed on flights to El Salvador, where the authoritarian government, allied with Mr. Trump, has agreed to hold the prisoners in exchange for a multimillion-dollar payment.
The Justice Department refused to answer basic inquiries on Monday about the deportations from the federal judge in Washington, D.C., who had ordered the deportation flight to return to the United States. On Tuesday afternoon, he ordered the Justice Department to submit a sealed filing by noon on Wednesday detailing the times at which the planes had taken off, left American airspace and ultimately landed in El Salvador.
More than half of the immigrants deported over the weekend were removed using an obscure authority known as the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which the Trump administration says it has invoked to deport suspected Venezuelan gang members age 14 or older with little to no due process. The rarely invoked law grants the president broad authority to remove from the United States citizens of foreign countries whom he defines as “alien enemies,” in cases of war or invasion.
In a court document it filed on Monday night after the hearing, Robert L. Cerna II, a senior Immigration and Customs Enforcement official, asserted that each of the individuals had been investigated and vetted and that those efforts had involved surveillance data, a review of financial transactions and interviews with victims.
But a number of questions were raised by Mr. Cerna’s filing, in which he said an ICE database showed that some of those sent to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act had been arrested and convicted in the United States “for dangerous offenses” and that others had convictions outside the country.
Mr. Cerna also acknowledged, though, that “many” did not have criminal records in American courts, though he said that did not mean they would “pose a limited threat.” Still others were said to have been in proximity to Tren de Aragua members during law enforcement raids on vehicles and residences when they were caught in the dragnet.
A growing chorus of families, elected officials and immigration lawyers have begun coming forward in the news media to reject or cast doubt on the allegations. Some lawyers — sent into frantic searches for their clients in detention centers across the country — believe their clients have been singled out simply for their tattoos. Immigration lawyers in New York were able to stop the deportation of at least one Venezuelan who they said had no ties to the gang.
Lindsay Toczylowski, a lawyer with the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, said her client was a young professional in his 30s who worked in the arts industry and had been in detention since he sought entry into the United States last year, when he applied for asylum using an online government app, CBP One. She said her client had come under suspicion because of his tattoos, but his lawyers had not been given the opportunity to counter the claims through a court hearing.
He was transferred earlier this month from California to Texas, she said, and by Saturday, he had disappeared from the online detainee locator.
“Our client is proof that they didn’t do the due diligence to understand who they were sending to El Salvador at all,” she said, declining to name the young man out of concern for his safety.
Some Democrats have not just accused the Trump administration of violating a court order but have also questioned whom the administration sent to El Salvador to be imprisoned.
“The Trump administration is deporting immigrants without due process based solely on their nationality,” Senator Dick Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, said in a statement on Monday. “Courts determine whether people have broken the law. Not a president acting solo.”
More than 260 people deported to El Salvador over the weekend included 137 people removed through the Alien Enemies Act. An additional 101 were Venezuelans were deported under normal immigration proceedings, according to Trump administration officials.
Lawyers and legal experts said that even under wartime conditions, detainees are entitled to due process.
“The Alien Enemy Act expressly provides for ‘a full examination and hearing’ before noncitizens can be removed under the statute,” Stephen Vladeck, a professor of law at the Georgetown University Law Center, said in an email. “Even in the middle of the Second World War, federal courts would hold hearings to determine if alleged alien enemies were, in fact, citizens of countries with which we’re at war.”
The government of Venezuela has forcefully condemned the transfer of Venezuelans to El Salvador and the use of the wartime authority by the Trump administration. In a statement on Sunday, the government of Nicolás Maduro denounced what he called the “threat of kidnapping” of minors as young as 14 by labeling them as terrorists, claiming that they are “considered criminals simply for being Venezuelan.”
Mariyin Araujo, 32, said the father of her two daughters, 2 and 6, had fled Venezuela after he participated in two demonstrations against Mr. Maduro’s authoritarian government. On the second occasion, he and other protesters were captured and tortured, with electric shocks and suffocation. He registered through the CBP One application in Mexico and was detained in San Diego when he presented himself for his appointment, Ms. Araujo said.
He was a professional soccer player and coach, and he had a tattoo on his arm of a crown atop a soccer ball. Ms. Araujo said that immigration officials associated the crown with the Venezuelan gang and that they had submitted documents showing that her ex-husband had no criminal history, along with photographs and letters from his employer to show he was a law-abiding citizen. But before his case had been decided, he called to tell her they were moving him to a detention center in Texas.
She did not know his whereabouts until she recognized him in a photo on social media, she said. He was sitting on the floor with his head bowed down in a white prison uniform with other detainees in El Salvador. She has tried to reach out to prison officials there, but she has since learned the facility where he is being held is notorious for not allowing phone calls or family visits.
“There was something inside of me that held out hope that it would not be him, but it was him,” she said. “He is not a criminal.”
Annie Correal and Luis Ferré-Sadurní contributed reporting.