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More than half of the 261 immigrants expelled to El Salvador on Saturday were swept out of the United States using a wartime powers act, a White House official said Sunday, amid questions about whether the Trump administration flouted a judge’s order barring use of the statute to hasten deportations.
President Donald Trump secretly signed a proclamation Friday invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, saying he would quickly remove Venezuelans aged 14 and over who allegedly belong to the transnational gang Tren de Aragua. Since then, 137 people were dispatched to the Central American nation via the proclamation, according to the White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the Trump administration’s enforcement strategy.
The rest were removed under other federal laws, including 23 people from El Salvador with ties to the MS-13 gang and 101 additional Venezuelans, the official said.
U.S. District Judge James Boasberg on Saturday temporarily blocked Trump from using the act to swiftly remove immigrants without a hearing and instructed officials to return any airplanes carrying them to the United States. He ruled after advocates sued saying the administration was denying immigrants due process and putting them in danger.
But early Sunday, Trump administration officials shared video footage from El Salvador that showed shackled immigrants being forced off airplanes at night and into a new mega-prison.
“Oopsie, too late,” Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele posted on X, referring to the judge’s decision, followed by a laughing emoji. Secretary of State Marco Rubio reposted it, and a White House spokesman responded with a meme saying, “Boom!”
Bukele said the United States sent his country 238 members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang and more than 20 members of the Salvadoran MS-13 gang. He released a three-minute video that showed the alleged gang members escorted off three planes by heavily armed men wearing camouflage as dramatic music played. The men were loaded onto buses and taken to the prison, where their heads were shaved. El Salvador said the United States will pay for the prisoners to be jailed.
“Thank you for your assistance and friendship, President Bukele,” Rubio posted on X.
Trump later reposted the video on social media and thanked the Salvadoran leader for his “understanding of this horrible situation.”
Rubio did not say how much the United States is paying, and State Department officials did not respond to questions Sunday.
Trump’s decision to deploy the Alien Enemies Act for the first time since World War II, when it paved the way for the incarceration of more than 110,000 Japanese Americans, alarmed immigration experts, legal scholars and others.
In exercising this wartime power, Trump called for the swift removal of Venezuelans allegedly involved in Tren de Aragua, stripping them of their right to an immigration court hearing. The act has been used only three times before to bar citizens of hostile enemy governments from the United States, and only during a declared war.
The White House made the proclamation public Saturday afternoon after advocates for immigrants sued. Deputy White House chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem “helped facilitate and orchestrate” the weekend flights to El Salvador, the White House official said.
DHS and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not respond to questions Sunday seeking details about the deportations and whether the immigrants were sent to El Salvador in defiance of the judge’s order. A spokeswoman for the Salvadoran government referred to the president’s statements.
Flight records reviewed by The Washington Post show that two flights left for El Salvador as the federal judge was reviewing the case, and a third flight left shortly after a written order was issued.
The first two flights took off from Texas at 5:26 p.m. and 5:45 p.m. Eastern time, according to data from Flightradar24, a flight-tracking site. Just before 7 p.m. Saturday, Boasberg told the Trump administration that any deportation flights dispatched using the authority should return to the United States. About 30 minutes later, a written order to that effect was entered on the court docket. Ten minutes after that, a third flight took off from Texas.
All three made stopovers in Honduras. The first two flights arrived in El Salvador after midnight, at 12:10 a.m. and 12:18 a.m. The third landed at 1:08 a.m. Sunday. There was no information made public about which categories of detainees were on each flight.
The Post matched the flights by looking at the planes in the video Bukele posted, which were all labeled GlobalX flights, and compared those to the only three GlobalX arrivals to El Salvador’s International Airport on March 15 and March 16.
Asked about the timing of the flights, the White House official pushed back on the validity of Boasberg’s order, saying a single judge should not have the power to usurp the president’s authority.
“We believe this is a baseless legal ruling no matter when the flights took off,” the official said, adding that the fact that two of the three deportation flights were out of the country before the judge’s order “strengthens our case.”
The Justice Department has said that most, if not all, of those deported under the proclamation were serious criminals, but it did not release their names publicly so that claim couldn’t be independently verified. Some of the gang members deported were members of the MS-13 gang tied to El Salvador, and the proclamation Friday does not appear to include them.
The high-profile actions make it clear that the administration will deploy force and fright to remove immigrants from the United States, even if they have to devise extraordinary new ways to do it, such as sending them to a country that is not their home country and putting them in jail.
The White House’s online mocking of the judicial order by the chief federal judge in Washington added to the concern among advocates that Trump’s determination to carry out the largest mass deportation campaign in U.S. history would sidestep legal and humanitarian norms.
American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Lee Gelernt, who successfully argued for the injunction at the remote hearing before Boasberg, said Sunday that the administration may have subverted the law if it expelled immigrants before alerting the public to Trump’s proclamation.
“The administration was legally required to publish the Proclamation before starting to use it but it appears the administration wanted a head start before any lawsuit could be filed,” Gelernt said in a statement. “We have asked the government this morning if they intend to assure the Court that nobody was removed under the Proclamation after the Court’s order.”
Michael Kozak, a top State Department official, said in a court filing Sunday that high-ranking U.S. officials – including Rubio – had been engaged in “intensive and delicate negotiations” in recent weeks with El Salvador and Venezuela to deport Tren de Aragua gang members. Officials had recently reached an agreement to deport them, he wrote.
However, the Justice Department said the original plaintiffs, five men from Venezuela, have not been deported.
Boasberg later expanded the case to include any Venezuelan who might be subject to Trump’s Alien Enemies Act proclamation.
Kozak, the senior official overseeing diplomatic relations in the Western Hemisphere, said Boasberg’s ruling halting the removals would harm U.S. foreign policy. The White House and State led the negotiations, which also included U.S. special envoy for Latin America Mauricio Claver-Carone and special presidential envoy Richard Grenell, he wrote.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, which will hear the Trump administration’s request to stay Boasberg’s orders, set a Tuesday deadline for the migrants’ lawyers to respond. The government has until Wednesday to file a rebuttal.
The three-judge panel hearing the appeal consists of Judges Karen LeCraft Henderson, a Ronald Reagan appointee, Patricia Millett, a Barack Obama appointee, and Justin Walker, a Trump appointee. Walker was on a 2022 panel that rejected GOP efforts to keep in place a Trump policy that allowed the government to summarily expel asylum seekers and others at U.S. borders.
Saturday’s flights to El Salvador were denounced by the Venezuelan government. A statement posted on Instagram by Foreign Minister Yvan Gil said the country “categorically and forcefully rejects the U.S. government’s proclamation that infamously and unjustly criminalizes Venezuelan immigration in an act that evokes the darkest episodes of human history, from slavery to the horror of the Nazi concentration camps.”
The decision to transport the alleged gang members to El Salvador also reignited questions about human rights violations in that country’s prison system. After years of high gang-related crime, Bukele declared an emergency in March 2022, temporarily suspending basic rights and ordering the arrests of thousands of gang members he labeled terrorists and putting them in high-security prisons. Violent crime and mass migration plunged, but human rights groups said the prisons are inhumane.
Bukele in February agreed to jail criminals the U.S. government cannot deport because of strained diplomatic relations with countries such as Venezuela, though El Salvador even offered to jail U.S. citizen offenders.
On Sunday, he said that the deportees were immediately transferred to the Terrorism Confinement Center, a mega-prison opened in 2023 for 20,000 detainees that Bukele has said could hold double that capacity. He said that the inmates would perform forced labor for at least a year, possibly more, and that the “United States will pay a very low fee for them.”
Human Rights Watch has documented torture, forced disappearances and a lack of legal recourse in Salvadoran prisons, as well as poor access to food and water. The organization has reported instances in which inmates are systematically beaten and forced to confess that they are members of gangs, according to Juan Pappier, Americas deputy director for the group.
Pappier said that El Salvador is offering to become “a Central American version of Guantánamo,” referring to the U.S. Naval base in Cuba that has held some migrant detainees, and that securing a release from the prison system is “extremely hard.”
“If they are taken to a court hearing it will be a virtual court hearing with hundreds of detainees at the same time,” Pappier added. “It will be almost impossible for them to be released. There is absolutely no way to communicate with them.”
While the Bukele government has invited social media influencers and some journalists to tour the prison, little is known about the conditions for inmates inside, said Carlos García, a journalist and researcher who specializes in the MS-13 gang.
García said he was not aware of any inmates who have been released from the prison since then and who have given public interviews about the conditions inside. “It was built like a concentration camp,” García said. “There is no recreational area, no yards outside. The inmates only receive sunlight through small windows.”
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Dan Diamond, Aaron Schaffer, Samantha Schmidt and Nitasha Tiku contributed to this report.
