The Renditions Are Backfiring

The White House is facing growing resistance and outrage from all quarters for its summary deportations of migrants and defiance of court orders.

Last week, we learned with growing horror of the summary rendition of hundreds of migrants to a prison in El Salvador. The Trump administration, without any supporting evidence, claimed all the migrants were hardened criminals and members of the Tren de Aragua gang of Venezuela.

To briefly recap the madness and chaos, on March 14, the White House issued a proclamation under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 (yes, that’s the correct century) claiming that we were effectively at war with Venezuela and that this fiction somehow justified the summary deportations of suspected Venezuelan gang members. These migrant “invaders” were being sent not to Venezuela, however, but to a special, high security terrorist prison facility in El Salvador, a country we are now paying to house rendered migrants. (The legality of the highly questionable and ripe-for-abuse practice of “rendition,” which seeks to remove the clear protections of the U.S. courts and the Constitution from any impacted individuals, is itself in doubt. But we’ll get to that another time.)

The next day, on March 15, the ACLU sued in federal court in D.C. to stop the planes filled with migrants from taking off. They succeeded in obtaining a temporary restraining order, issued from the bench by Judge James Boasberg, who even ordered any planes in the air to turn around.

As we all know, the planes continued on. One even departed well after Judge Boasberg’s written order came down. This situation deepened the current constitutional crisis, as we witnessed the administration defy a direct court order.

Since then, there have been some notable developments exposing the administration’s entire operation as a sham from the get-go. Reports on the ground of non-gang members being swept up in this nightmare are now circulating widely. And the administration and its spokespersons are looking increasingly unhinged—and lately entirely on their own as Trump himself backs off from the mess and begins to throw others under the bus.

Judge Boasberg appears ready to smack heads together

Judge Boasberg held a hearing on Friday, March 21, and it did not go well for the government. Per a summary by CBS reporter Scott MacFarlane, who attended the hearing live, the day began with the judge noting the “disrespectful language” in the Department of Justice’s filings, which was unlike anything he’d ever seen before. Not the way you want the day to start if you’re the government attorney.

The judge then hammered the Justice Department’s lawyer about apparent defiance of his orders, before 1) getting him to admit that he’d understood the oral order to turn the planes around, and 2) backing him into a corner over whether he knew about the flights that had taken off during a recess in the hearing, which the judge had called expressly so that the government lawyer could obtain details about these very flights.

“Are you saying no one told you about those flights?” Judge Boasberg asked.

The DOJ lawyer responded with a dodge, saying he didn’t personally know of the flights. That’s right: He claimed because he didn’t witness the flights take off himself or talk to their captains, he had no personal knowledge, even if others told him they were about to take off.

The rebuke from the judge was swift. “I often tell my clerks before they go out in the world to practice law,” he said, “the most treasured valued item… is reputation and credibility.”

Judge Boasberg had lots of questions that remain unanswered. Why was the proclamation signed in secret? The lawyer didn’t know. Is that because the government knew there would be legal challenges? No response.

Also, what happens if someone is not a gang member or even a Venezuelan? How do they challenge their removal?

Judge Boasberg then made an important point that the press keeps missing. These migrants were already in custody. They weren’t seeking release from that custody, just non-removal under the Alien Enemies Act, which of course is a wartime law, and we aren’t at war with Venezuela.

The other important point, which the judge knows he is queuing up for the inevitable appeal, is this: His restraining order doesn’t prevent the Trump administration from continuing to deport people under existing law. He isn’t usurping some power of the president to deport migrants. They just have to do it legally.

In so framing the question, the judge highlighted what lies at the heart of this case: Why did the White House need to invoke a wartime law from the late 1700s, all to extraterritorially render a few hundred migrants who were already in custody?

Public anger mounts over non-gang member renditions

Since the apparently illegal and obviously rushed renditions occurred, the media has dug into who was swept up in the operation. While the government continues to insist that it was only criminal gang members, the weight of evidence so far contradicts this.

Take the case of Jerce Reyes Barrios, a Venezuelan soccer player. As Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute reported, Barrios applied for asylum legally in the U.S. in 2024 after escaping Venezuela, where he had been tortured by the Maduro regime for his anti-government activities. Barrios had committed no crimes, had no criminal record and no gang membership.

But Barrios was labeled a gang member for allegedly having a gang tattoo. His lawyers insist that it is a Real Madrid tattoo, and that ICE got it wrong. Nevertheless, the U.S. put him in detention in the U.S. then rendered him to prison in El Salvador along with the other migrants.

Or the case of “Andrys,” a 23-year old gay make-up artist who got swept up in the renditions. As Joshua Reed Eakle, Executive Director of Project Liberal, eloquently writes,

Two photos that should deeply disturb you.

The first photo is of a young Venezuelan named Andrys—a 23-year-old gay makeup artist who was disappeared by the Trump administration, recently identified publicly for the first time.

Last week, he was deported into a Salvadoran mega-prison without due process, without a court hearing, and without evidence—solely based on suspicion of gang ties.

The second photo was captured by an American photojournalist embedded inside that same mega-prison in El Salvador. The journalist documented the experiences of detainees, including American residents who've had their constitutional rights suspended.

As that journalist’s piece recounts in chilling detail,

“The intake began with slaps. One young man sobbed when a guard pushed him to the floor. He said, ‘I’m not a gang member. I’m gay. I’m a barber.’ I believed him. But maybe it’s only because he didn’t look like what I had expected—he wasn’t a tattooed monster.”

The fact that migrants who arrived here legally seeking asylum from persecution from the Maduro regime would be misidentified as gang members and rendered to El Salvador, where they were then badly mistreated and dehumanized, is shocking much of the American public to its core. In response, many in the press are upping the pressure and demanding answers. Unsurprisingly, the administration is doubling down.

Sort of.

The administration is floundering before the press

I try to remain objective in assessing the performance of Trump White House officials and spokespersons. But by any objective, non-MAGA cult measure, they have been digging quite the hole.

Take Tom Homan, the cartoonishly monstrous head of U.S. Customs and Border Protection who has gone before the media and dodged basic questions over the deportees’ constitutional rights. On Sunday he appeared on ABC’s This Week with Jonathan Karl and was grilled about the rights of the migrants who suffered summary rendition without any hearing whatsover. There was a remarkable exchange, at the end of which a clearly disturbed Karl had heard just about enough from his guest:

Karl: Do they have any due process at all?

Homan: Due process… what was Laken Riley’s due process?

Let’s be very clear. Homan is claiming that because Laken Riley was murdered by one Venezuelan migrant, all Venezuelan migrants may now be denied due process and summarily deported. He dodged Karl’s question precisely because he knows that every person on American soil is entitled to due process under the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Homan has also infamously claimed that he “doesn’t care what a judge thinks” and that the deportations are going to continue. That’s a very big, bold (and unconstitutional) flex, but Karl pressed, finally cornering Homan with a direct question: “But you are not going to defy those orders?”

Homan hesitated and realized he was now standing at the brink of a constitutional crisis. And in the end he stepped back from it.

“No,” Homan answered.

Other official spokespersons for the White House, especially Attorney General Pam Bondi and Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, have similarly been out with patently false claims about the migrants sent to prison in El Salvador.

Bondi claimed on Fox News it was “basic public safety” to “get these people out of our country as fast as we can”—never mind that they were already in custody. “They’re not immigrants. They’re illegal aliens who are committing the most violent crimes you can imagine on Americans.”

As senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, noted:

“Outright falsehood from Bondi, whose own Department of Justice submitted a declaration from an ICE official that “many” of the people sent to El Salvador had no criminal record at all — and then tried to argue that absence of evidence of their danger made them more dangerous.”

For her part, Press Secretary Leavitt insisted, in response to a simple question about why the names and identities of the migrants rendered to El Salvador could not released, that ICE was “100 percent confident” in the individuals who were put on the flights, despite mounting evidence that there were grave mistakes in identifying gang members.

Indeed, in addition to those horrifically swept up and accused of being gang members, El Salvador returned at least one migrant noting she was a woman and had been put on a plane bound for a prison for men.

This raises the question squarely: How can ICE maintain “100 percent confidence” in their identification of migrants who could be deported to an all-male prison if they couldn’t even get their genders correct?

Zooming out, the White House, Homeland Security and ICE are insisting that we should trust them and they are 100 percent confident in the operation, when 1) that’s not how due process under the Constitution works, and 2) they’ve already been called out on some apparently major mistakes.

The vast majority of Americans do not support summary deportations without a hearing and are wary of giving powers to ICE and Homeland Security that can be abused. The string of horror stories about foreign tourists (and some American citizens) who have been detained by CBP for weeks, without explanation or a hearing, only add to the growing outcry against a lawless, arbitrary and cruel system.

And that has even Donald Trump backing off and trying to wash his hands of this.

Trump is backpedaling and undermining his own proclamation

Apart from the judge’s scathing takedowns, the public backlash and the absurd posturing of administration officials, there’s another clear sign that the rendition is backfiring: Trump himself is trying to back away from it and claim no responsibility.

When asked by Fox reporter James Doocy about Judge Boasberg’s question, i.e., why the Alien Enemies Act proclamation was signed in the dark and why people were rushed on to planes, Trump gave away the game.

After saying that they want to get criminals out of the country, Trump said of the proclamation, “I don’t know when it was signed. I didn’t sign it. Other people handled it.”

This was an astonishing statement. If he didn’t sign it, was it even in effect? Why was he backtracking so quickly? And who was he tossing under the bus now, Secretary of State Marco Rubio?

The White House went into very awkward damage control mode. Later that day, as Kaitlan Collins of CNN reported, the White House next claimed that Trump was referring to the original Alien Enemies Act of 1798 and insisted that Trump had signed the new proclamation invoking it.

This of course makes no sense. Of course Trump didn’t sign the original law from 1798. Why would he even need to make that clear? Other people “handled” it because, as everyone listening to the question understood, it was about the proclamation, and clearly someone else had “handled it” for the president.

Trump often acts with feral instinct, and in his gut he knows that these renditions have now soured the public against those responsible for it. Like he has done many other times, he is now professing no knowledge of when it was signed or who was responsible. It’s a convenient dodge, but it’s not going to hold up either in a court of law or the court of public opinion.

Trump is looking for someone to blame for this fiasco, and so someone is going to have to pretend they were the ones who overstepped. Overreach and abuse of power is par for the course for this administration, and no matter how many rounds of musical chairs they play, someone else will ultimately have to take the fall for this mess.

Because if there’s one thing we know about Trump, he’ll make sure he’s never left without a prime, wide seat when the music stops.