Trump Invokes 1798 Wartime Law to Disappear Men into a Salvadoran Mega-Prison

A 227-Year-Old Wartime Law

On March 15, 2025, Donald Trump signed a proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 — a wartime statute used only three times in American history, most notoriously to justify the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. The United States is not at war. Trump’s proclamation declared instead that the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua was conducting an “invasion” of the country, a stretching of statutory language designed to bypass every protection of ordinary immigration law: no charges, no hearings, no defense, no appeal.

Within hours, three deportation flights took off carrying men the administration had unilaterally labeled gang members. Chief Judge James Boasberg of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia issued an emergency order from the bench: turn the planes around. The administration ignored him. The flights landed in El Salvador, where 137 men were marched off the tarmac and into the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo — CECOT — a sprawling concrete fortress where Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s government holds people incommunicado, without visitation, without lawyers, and on terms human rights groups have likened to enforced disappearance.

Subsequent reporting and court filings would establish that many of the men had no documented gang affiliation at all. Some were identified solely on the basis of tattoos. At least one was pulled from the U.S. with explicit court protection that forbade his removal.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia

Kilmar Abrego Garcia was the test case the administration did not want. Abrego Garcia is a Salvadoran-born Maryland resident who had fled gang violence as a teenager. In 2019, an immigration judge granted him “withholding of removal” — a formal legal protection that specifically barred the U.S. government from deporting him to El Salvador because of the demonstrated risk to his life. He was married to a U.S. citizen. He was raising a five-year-old son with disabilities.

On March 12, 2025, ICE officers arrested him outside a Baltimore IKEA, with his son in the car. Three days later, in defiance of the court order he carried, he was on a plane to CECOT.

The administration eventually conceded in court filings that Abrego Garcia’s deportation was an “administrative error.” It then refused to fix it. On April 10, 2025, the Supreme Court ruled — unanimously, in an opinion joined by every Republican appointee on the bench — that the government must “facilitate” his release from CECOT and treat his case as it would have been handled had he never been illegally removed. The opinion was as direct a rebuke as the Roberts Court ever issues to a sitting administration.

The administration’s response was contempt — both in tone and in the legal sense. At an April 11 hearing before U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis, Justice Department lawyers refused to say where Abrego Garcia was, refused to commit to any specific step toward his return, and refused even to confirm whether anyone had asked Bukele to release him. Xinis told the DOJ she had “no tolerance for gamesmanship.” The administration argued, in effect, that having handed Abrego Garcia to a foreign government, it no longer had any obligation to retrieve him.

A Constitutional Stress Test

The Abrego Garcia case is the cleanest possible test of the rule of law in Trump’s second term. A unanimous Supreme Court told the executive branch to undo a wrongful deportation. The executive branch said no. There is no doctrine of executive privilege, no national-security carveout, and no foreign-policy deference that permits the U.S. government to ignore a unanimous order from the highest court in the land. The administration’s posture is, simply, that it does not have to comply.

The CECOT pipeline is also a constitutional test for everyone else who lives in the United States. The legal theory the administration is asserting — that a president can declare an “invasion,” invoke an 18th-century war law, and ship anyone he chooses, citizens or not, to an indefinite cell in a foreign prison — has no limiting principle. If the Alien Enemies Act can be used against Venezuelan migrants today, on the strength of a presidential declaration alone, it can be used against anyone tomorrow. CECOT was designed to hold gang members. The Trump administration is using it to test how far it can go before American courts make it stop.

So far, the answer is: further than the Constitution permits, and farther than any prior administration of either party would have dared.