Annie Correal
Reporting from Mexico City
A mother in Venezuela fears her son was deported and sent to a Salvadoran prison.
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Mirelis Casique’s 24-year-old son last spoke to her on Saturday morning from a detention center in Laredo, Texas. He told her he was going to be deported with a group of other Venezuelans, she said, but he didn’t know where they were headed.
Shortly after, his name disappeared from the website of the U.S. immigration authorities. She has not heard from him since.
“Now he’s in an abyss with no one to rescue him,” Ms. Casique said on Sunday in an interview from her home in Venezuela.
The deportation of 238 Venezuelans to El Salvador this weekend has created panic among families who fear that their relatives are among those handed over by the Trump administration to the Salvadoran authorities, apparently without due process.
The men were described by the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, as “terrorists” belonging to the Tren de Aragua gang. She called them “heinous monsters” who had recently been arrested, “saving countless American lives.” But several relatives of men believed to be in the group say their loved ones do not have gang ties.
On Sunday, the Salvadoran government released images of the men being marched into a notorious mega-prison in handcuffs overnight, with their heads newly shaven.
Like other Venezuelan families, Ms. Casique has no proof that her son, Francisco Javier García Casique, is part of the group, which was transferred to El Salvador on Saturday as part of a deal between President Nayib Bukele and the Trump administration. The Salvadoran leader has offered to hold the Venezuelan migrants at the expense of the U.S. government.
However, Ms. Casique said that not only had her son’s name disappeared from the website of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, she also recognized him in one of the photos of the recently arrived deportees that El Salvador’s government has circulated. When she saw him in the photograph, she said, she felt “broken at the injustice” of what was taking place.
Neither government has made public the names of the Venezuelan deportees, and a spokeswoman for the Salvadoran government did not respond to a request for confirmation that Ms. Casique’s son was part of the group. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which oversees Immigration and Customs Enforcement, did not respond to a request to confirm whether Mr. García had been deported to El Salvador, either.
Ms. Casique said she had identified Mr. García by the tattoos on one of his arms, as well as by his build and complexion, though his face was not visible. The photo shows a group of men in white shirts and shorts with shaved heads, their arms restrained behind their backs.
In recent years, Venezuelans have migrated to the United States in record numbers, as their country has spiraled into crisis under the government of Nicolás Maduro. Because Mr. Maduro, unlike most other leaders in the region, has not accepted regular deportation flights from the United States, the Trump administration has been looking for other ways to deport Venezuelans.
On Sunday, Venezuela’s government forcefully denounced the transfer of the migrants to El Salvador, saying in a statement that the United States had used an outdated law — the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 — to carry out an illegal operation that violated both American and international laws.
From the start of his presidential campaign, Mr. Trump has focused on Tren de Aragua and its presence in the United States. When he deported a large group of Venezuelans last month to Guantánamo, a U.S. military base on Cuba, Mr. Trump also said that the deportees belonged to the gang, a claim that some of their relatives have denied.
Neither the United States nor the Salvadoran government has offered evidence that the migrants are connected to Tren de Aragua, a gang that originated in Venezuela’s prisons but whose reach now extends throughout Latin America. Mr. Trump, whose government designated it a terrorist group, has zeroed in on incidents that, he said, show the presence of Tren de Aragua in the United States.
Mr. Bukele said that the deportees would be held for at least a year and made to perform labor and attend workshops under a program called “Zero Idleness.”
Ms. Casique said her son had no gang affiliation and had entered the United States to seek asylum in late 2023, after several years spent working in Peru to support his family back home. During his journey north, he was injured in Mexico when he fell from a train, she said.
Mr. García, who had turned himself over to the authorities at the U.S. border, was detained at a routine appearance before immigration officers last year after they spotted his tattoos, Ms. Casique said.
The tattoos, which she says include a crown with the word “peace” in Spanish and the names of his mother, grandmother and sisters, led the authorities to place Mr. García under investigation and label him as a suspected member of Tren de Aragua, according to Ms. Casique.
Mr. García remained in a detention center in Dallas for two months, his mother said, but a judge ultimately decided that he did not pose a danger and allowed him to be released as long as he wore an electronic device to track his movements.
The New York Times could not independently verify why he had been held and released.
After Mr. Trump’s inauguration this year, Mr. García became worried, but Ms. Casique remembered telling her son that he had nothing to fear: The administration said it would go after criminals first.
But on Feb. 6, the authorities arrived at Mr. García’s door and took him into custody.
“I told him to follow the country’s rules, that he wasn’t a criminal, and at most, they would deport him,” Ms. Casique said. “But I was very naïve — I thought the laws would protect him.”
Gabriel Labrador contributed reporting from San Salvador.
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Devlin Barrett
The White House denied that it had refused to comply with a judge’s order to halt deportations of Venezuelans under the Alien Enemies Act, saying the order had been issued after the migrants “had already been removed from U.S. territory.” The statement from Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, did not specify where the flight was at the time of order by the judge, James E. Boasberg, who said from the bench that flights carrying such immigrants return to the United States, “whether turning around the plane or not.” The statement claimed the order “had no lawful basis,” but also said “a single judge in a single city” could not direct military movements.
Mattathias Schwartz
Reporting on the federal courts from Philadelphia
With deportation flights to El Salvador, Trump may have defied a judge’s order.
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The Trump administration moved one large step closer to a constitutional showdown with the judicial branch of government when airplane-loads of Venezuelan detainees deplaned in El Salvador even though a federal judge had ordered that the planes reverse course and return the detainees to the United States.
The right-wing president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, bragged that the 238 detainees who had been aboard the aircraft were transferred to a Salvadoran “Terrorism Confinement Center,” where they would be held for at least a year.
“Oopsie … Too late,” Mr. Bukele wrote in a social media post on Sunday morning that was recirculated by the White House communications director, Steven Cheung.
Around the same time, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in another social media post, thanked Mr. Bukele for a lengthy post detailing the migrants’ incarceration.
“This sure looks like contempt of court to me,” said David Super, a law professor at Georgetown University. “You can turn around a plane if you want to.”
Some details of the government’s actions remained unclear, including the exact time the planes landed. In a Sunday afternoon filing, the Trump administration said the State Department and Homeland Security Department were “promptly notified” of the judge’s written order when it was posted to the electronic docket at 7:26 p.m. Eastern time on Saturday. The filing implied that the government had a different legal authority for deporting the Venezuelans besides the one blocked by the judge, which could provide a basis for them to remain in El Salvador while the order is appealed.
The administration said that the five plaintiffs who filed suit to block their deportations — the suit that yielded the judge’s order — had not been deported.
On Sunday, legal analysts were still stitching together the timeline, trying to determine where the planes were shortly before 7 p.m. Eastern time on Saturday — and how close the Trump administration is to open defiance of the Constitution’s system of checks and balances.
That was when Judge James E. Boasberg of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ordered the Trump administration to cease its use of an obscure wartime law, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, as a pretext for the expulsion of migrants, and immediately return anyone it was expelling under the act to the United States.
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Regardless of the timing, Judge Boasberg’s order appeared to have been brushed aside by the Trump administration, which went ahead and turned the Venezuelans over to the government of El Salvador for detention. In touting the event, Mr. Rubio made no mention of Judge Boasberg’s order. On Saturday, the judge had ordered the government to return anyone removed under the Alien Enemies Act to U.S. soil, “however that’s accomplished — whether turning around the plane or not.”
The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, issued a statement on Sunday denying that the administration had refused to comply with the order, and questioning the judge’s authority to issue it.
In a 25-page appellate filing on Sunday, Justice Department lawyers called the order by Judge Boasberg, who was nominated to the bench by President Barack Obama, a “massive, unauthorized imposition on the Executive’s authority.” Mr. Trump’s actions, they argued, “are not subject to judicial review” because of what they said was the presidency’s inherent constitutional authority over national security and foreign policy matters, and that the federal courts as a whole lacked jurisdiction over his exercise of a “war power.”
Federal judges have been clashing with the Trump administration for weeks over dozens of executive actions that the courts have tried to put on temporary hold while their legality is assessed. In some cases, plaintiffs who sued the administration and won obtained favorable judicial orders have returned to court saying the administration was failing to comply with them.
On Friday, a kidney transplant specialist and professor at Brown University’s medical school was deported from the United States, even though a court had ordered her expulsion temporarily blocked, according to her attorney and federal court documents.
But the mockery by Mr. Bukele — and the tacit endorsements of it by senior administration officials — seemed to push Washington closer to a constitutional crisis, critics of the administration said Sunday.
“Court order defied,” wrote Mark S. Zaid, a Washington lawyer whose legal fights with the administration have put him in Mr. Trump’s cross hairs. In a social media post, Mr. Zaid said the events on Saturday and Sunday were the “start of true constitutional crisis.”
Other experts were concerned but more cautious.
“We need a little more development of the facts,” said Adam Winkler, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. “If the report is true about timing, then it does seem like the administration has ignored a binding court order. And if that’s the case, then the courts must act swiftly to punish the Trump administration. We cannot have the executive branch ignoring the orders of the judicial branch.”
On Saturday, the Trump administration claimed authority under the Alien Enemies Act to immediately deport any Venezuelan citizen age 14 or older who the administration says is a member of Tren de Aragua, a violent criminal gang that was designated a foreign terrorist organization in February. In its proclamation on Saturday, the White House called the gang a “hybrid criminal state” that was “perpetrating an invasion” of the United States, justifying use of the 1798 law, which had only been invoked three times before — for the War of 1812, World War I and World War II.
Earlier in the day, anticipating that step, five Venezuelans in federal custody filed a class-action lawsuit claiming that their expulsion on that basis would violate federal law and the Constitution’s guarantee to due process. Judge Boasberg soon issued a restraining order blocking their removal.
Then, in a hearing on Saturday afternoon, lawyers for the plaintiffs told the judge that two planes carrying other Venezuelans expelled under the Alien Enemies Act were “in the air.” From the bench, shortly before 7 p.m., Judge Boasberg ordered the government to turn the planes around and bring the detainees back. Then he issued a second written order barring the government from using the Alien Enemies Act to deport any suspected members of Tren De Aragua.
The flights to El Salvador marked the second time in quick succession that the administration has been accused of deporting someone in violation of a court order. Lawyers for Dr. Rasha Alawieh, a doctor specializing in kidney transplant patients and a professor at Brown University’s medical school, said she was deported on Friday despite a court order to the contrary from Judge Leo T. Sorokin of the Federal District Court in Massachusetts. On Sunday, Judge Sorokin gave the government a Monday deadline to respond to charges that it had “willfully disobeyed” his order.
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Skye Perryman, chief executive of Democracy Forward, which has helped bring a multitude of lawsuits against the Trump administration, said she still expects the government to comply with court orders.
“We will continue to work through the courts to ensure that orders are faithfully executed and — if not — that there is accountability for the government,” she said in a statement on Sunday.
The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said on Friday that court orders blocking Mr. Trump’s agenda were “unconstitutional and unfair.” That added to speculation, prompted by statements made by Mr. Trump and Vice President JD Vance on social media, that the White House might openly defy the judiciary, which under the Constitution is a branch of government equal in authority to the executive.
Mr. Super, the Georgetown law professor, said the Justice Department’s arguments for deference to the president’s sole power to conduct foreign policy may be weighed by an appeals court when it considers whether to uphold Judge Boasberg’s order, but they do not provide a justification for violating the order.
“You have to comply with court orders until they’re reversed,” he said. “Otherwise, you and I become our own courts. We follow what we think is right, we violate what we think is wrong, and the judges may as well go home.”
Tim Balk, Alan Feuer, Charlie Savage, Maggie Haberman, Devlin Barrett, Annie Correal and Dana Goldstein contributed reporting. Seamus Hughes contributed research.
Minho Kim
Reporting from Washington
Some Democrats are seething at Schumer for allowing the spending bill to pass.
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Many Democratic lawmakers continued to express deep frustration at Senator Chuck Schumer on Sunday for having broken with most of his party to allow a Republican spending bill to pass, as the Democratic base increasingly demands stauncher resistance to President Trump’s far-reaching agenda.
Mr. Schumer, a New York Democrat and the Senate minority leader, joined nine other Democrats in allowing the bill to come to a vote, which averted a government shutdown. It was an abrupt reversal from Wednesday, when he said he would oppose the bill.
Explaining his sudden shift in position, Mr. Schumer argued that a shutdown would empower Mr. Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. “A shutdown would shut down all government agencies, and it would solely be up to Trump and DOGE and Musk what to open again, because they could determine what was essential,” he told The New York Times in an interview. “So their goal of decimating the whole federal government, of cutting agency after agency after agency, would occur under a shutdown.”
But to critics within his own party, he had squandered the leverage provided by the standoff to negotiate a bipartisan spending bill that would reclaim some of Congress’s power.
“He is absolutely wrong,” Representative Jasmine Crockett, Democrat of Texas, told CNN on Sunday. “The idea that Chuck Schumer is the only one that’s got a brain in the room and the only one that can think through all of the pros and cons is absolutely ridiculous.”
The stream of criticism that Mr. Schumer has faced since his vote comes as the Democratic Party is divided on how best to oppose Mr. Trump’s agenda while facing dismal polling numbers. An NBC poll released on Sunday showed that just 27 percent of voters had positive views of the party, while a majority of its base expressed disappointment at the Democrats’ fractured response.
Ms. Crockett has called on her Senate colleagues to consider ousting Mr. Schumer as minority leader, suggesting that “a younger, fresher leadership” is what “many Americans may be looking for.”
Representative James E. Clyburn, Democrat of South Carolina, told MSNBC that the House minority leader, Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, “got blindsided” by Mr. Schumer. House Democrats — all but one opposed the bill — had voted against giving Mr. Trump “a blank check,” Mr. Clyburn said. On Friday, Mr. Jeffries dodged repeated questions on whether he still supported Mr. Schumer as the leader of Senate Democrats.
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Another House Democrat, Representative Debbie Dingell of Michigan, was a little more understanding, saying that Mr. Schumer had “sent out mixed signals.” But she stressed that even the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest labor union representing federal workers, whose members would be furloughed during a government shutdown, opposed the stopgap bill.
“People are scared, and they want us to do something,” Ms. Dingell said on CBS. “They want to see Democrats fighting back.”
Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, did not denounce Mr. Schumer but pleaded for a change in tactics and for a more steadfast resistance against the Trump administration.
“The way the president is acting using law enforcement to target dissidents, harassing TV stations and radio stations that criticize him, endorsing political violence, puts our democracy at immediate risk,” Mr. Murphy said on NBC. Over the past few weeks, Mr. Trump has revoked security clearances of lawyers who argued against him, dismantled congressionally funded news agencies and pardoned those convicted of attacking the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Mr. Murphy added, “If you are a Democrat in the Senate or in the House you have to start acting with urgency.”
Prominent House Democrats, including Representative Nancy Pelosi, had pressed their Senate colleagues to block the bill. But more than a handful of Democratic senators joined Mr. Schumer in helping Republicans bring the bill to a vote: Dick Durbin of Illinois, Brian Schatz of Hawaii, Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, as well as two who have announced plans to retire, Gary Peters of Michigan and Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire. Senator Angus King, the Maine independent who caucuses with Democrats, also voted yes.
Some Democrats, including Representatives Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts and Haley Stevens of Michigan, refrained from openly criticizing Mr. Schumer’s shift. They said Democratic infighting after the bill’s passage would only emphasize the divisions within the party. They warned that it would also draw voters’ attention away from Trump trade policies that have dampened the stock market and imbued uncertainty into the broader economy — developments that Democrats said could play to their advantage.
Ashley Etienne, a former communications director for Vice President Kamala Harris, told CNN that Democrats should not save Mr. Trump and Republicans from themselves. “Get out of the way,” she said. “Donald Trump said he was better for the economy. Let him prove it.”
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Dana Goldstein
A doctor and professor is deported despite a judge’s order.
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A kidney transplant specialist and professor at Brown University’s medical school has been deported from the United States, even though she had a valid visa and a court order temporarily blocking her expulsion, according to her lawyer and court papers.
Dr. Rasha Alawieh, 34, is a Lebanese citizen who had traveled to her home country last month to visit relatives. She was detained on Thursday when she returned from that trip to the United States, according to a court complaint filed by her cousin Yara Chehab.
Judge Leo T. Sorokin of the Federal District Court in Massachusetts ordered the government on Friday evening to provide the court with 48 hours’ notice before deporting Dr. Alawieh. But she was put on a flight to Paris, presumably on her way to Lebanon.
In a second order filed Sunday morning, the judge said there was reason to believe U.S. Customs and Border Protection had willfully disobeyed his previous order to give the court notice before expelling the doctor. He said he had followed “common practice in this district as it has been for years,” and ordered the federal agency to respond to what he called “serious allegations.”
Customs and Border Protection did not respond on Sunday to questions from The New York Times about why Dr. Alawieh had been detained and deported. Lebanon is not included on a draft list of nations from which the Trump administration is considering banning entry to the United States.
A hearing in Dr. Alawieh’s case is scheduled for Monday.
Court documents related to the case were provided to The New York Times by Clare Saunders, a member of the legal team representing Ms. Chehab, who filed petitions to prevent her cousin’s deportation, and then to request that her cousin be allowed to return to the United States.
Ms. Chehab’s petitions name several members of the Trump administration as defendants, including Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, Peter Flores.
Thomas Brown, a lawyer representing Dr. Alawieh and her employer, Brown Medicine, said that while the doctor was in Lebanon, the U.S. Consulate issued her an H-1B visa, which allows highly skilled foreign citizens to live and work in the United States. Brown Medicine, a nonprofit medical practice, had sponsored her application for the visa.
According to Ms. Chehab’s complaint, when Dr. Alawieh landed at Boston Logan International Airport on Thursday, she was detained by Customs and Border Protection officers and held at the airport for 36 hours, for reasons that are unclear.
Ms. Saunders, the lawyer, said in an affidavit that she went to the airport Friday and notified Customs and Border Protection officials there — before the flight to Paris was scheduled to depart — that there was a court order barring the doctor’s expulsion. She said that the officers took no action and gave her no information until after the plane had taken off.
Dr. Alawieh graduated from the American University of Beirut in 2015. Three years later, she came to the United States, where she held medical fellowships at the Ohio State University and the University of Washington, and then worked as a resident at Yale.
Before the new visa was issued, she held a J-1 visa, a type commonly used by foreign students.
There is a shortage of American doctors working in Dr. Alawieh’s area of specialty, transplant nephrology. Foreign-born physicians play an important role in the field, according to experts.
Fear over immigration status could “harm the pipeline even more,” said Dr. George Bayliss, who works in the Brown Medicine kidney transplant program with Dr. Alawieh.
Her patients included individuals awaiting transplants and those dealing with the complex conditions that can occur after a transplant, Dr. Bayliss said. He called Dr. Alawieh “a very talented, very thoughtful physician.”
“We are all outraged,” he added, “and none of us know why this happened.”
In a Sunday letter to members of the university community, Brown’s administration advised foreign students, ahead of spring break, to “consider postponing or delaying personal travel outside the United States until more information is available from the U.S. Department of State.”
Susan C. Beachy contributed research.
A correction was made on
March 16, 2025
:
Because of an editing error, an earlier headline with this article referred incorrectly to Dr. Rasha Alawieh’s medical specialty. She is a nephrologist, not a surgeon.
When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know at nytnews@nytimes.com.Learn more
David Enrich
As Voice of America goes dark, some broadcasts are replaced by music.
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For more than 80 years, Voice of America transmitted the news into countries, many of them authoritarian, where reliable sources of information about the outside world were often hard to come by.
Now those broadcasts — long viewed as an important part of U.S. efforts to promote democracy and transparency overseas — are flickering out.
Hours after President Trump signed an executive order on Friday calling for the dismantling of the federal agency that oversees Voice of America, hundreds of journalists, executives and other employees at the organization’s headquarters in Washington were informed that they were being put on paid leave. Employees said they quickly lost access to their work email and other communications programs.
Much of Voice of America’s content is produced in Washington and then transmitted to a network of affiliates worldwide. With most of Voice of America’s work force locked out, at least some of its radio frequencies in Asia, the Middle East and elsewhere went dark or began airing nothing but music, employees said.
In other cases, radio, television and digital outlets that used Voice of America programming will remain online but without contributions from the United States. Some of those affiliates also carry content provided by state media from countries like Russia and China, which Voice of America’s programming had, in effect, countered.
“They have pulled the plug operationally,” said David Z. Seide, a lawyer at the Government Accountability Project who defends federal whistle-blowers and who represents some Voice of America journalists.
Mr. Seide said he was considering legal challenges aimed at reinstating Voice of America journalists. The American Foreign Service Association, whose ranks include Voice of America employees, said it “will mount a vigorous defense” of those employees.
The Trump administration’s efforts to shut down Voice of America are part of a broader campaign to weaken the news media. The White House, for example, has barred The Associated Press from covering certain events over its refusal to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. Mr. Trump and his allies have sued news outlets, and his allies have said they are eyeing more litigation.
Voice of America began broadcasting in 1942, part of a federal effort during World War II to combat Nazi propaganda in Latin America and elsewhere. During the Cold War, its shortwave radio broadcasts behind the Iron Curtain were part of the U.S. government’s campaign to counter communism and foster freedom. At least until this weekend, Voice of America transmitted reports in dozens of languages and reached hundreds of millions of listeners outside the United States, including in countries like China and Iran, whose governments impose strict controls on outside news sources.
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Voice of America’s charter was designed to protect its editorial independence from whichever administration is in power. Its mandate is to serve as a reliable source of news, to present “a balanced and comprehensive” portrait of America, and to “present the policies of the United States clearly and effectively.”
In Mr. Trump’s first term, the White House repeatedly railed against what it saw as Voice of America’s liberal bias. The administration’s efforts to align the taxpayer-financed broadcaster with Mr. Trump’s agenda, including by conducting internal investigations of some of its journalists, were later deemed improper by federal investigators.
This year, Mr. Trump has moved swiftly to quiet the broadcaster. He tapped a right-wing former TV news anchor, Kari Lake, to run Voice of America. Even before she arrived, the broadcaster began discouraging its journalists from saying or writing things that could be construed as critical of Mr. Trump — part of an attempt that its leaders hoped would help fend off attacks by the president.
The White House on Saturday issued a news release denouncing what it said was the broadcaster’s role in spreading “radical propaganda” and accusing its employees of entrenched left-wing bias. It is the same critique that Mr. Trump and his allies routinely make about the traditional media.
Steven Herman, a longtime Voice of America correspondent, was put on an extended “excused absence” this month, pending a human-resources investigation into his social media posts about the Trump administration. On Saturday, he published what he described as a “requiem” for the broadcaster.
“To effectively shutter the Voice of America is to dim a beacon that burned bright during some of the darkest hours since 1942,” Mr. Herman wrote.
A correction was made on
March 16, 2025
:
An earlier version of this article misstated the middle initial of David Seide, a lawyer at the Government Accountability Project. It’s Z, not K.
When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know at nytnews@nytimes.com.Learn more
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Stephanie Saul
A Cornell graduate student fearing deportation files a pre-emptive lawsuit.
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An international graduate student at Cornell University filed a lawsuit on Saturday to block enforcement of two White House executive orders that, he fears, could result in his deportation from the United States for pro-Palestinian activism.
The suit was filed by Momodou Taal, a doctoral student in Africana studies at Cornell and an outspoken critic of U.S. policy in the Middle East. It cites a threat made by President Trump after the arrest and detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a recent graduate of Columbia University and legal U.S. resident whom the Trump administration is trying to deport.
“This is the first arrest of many to come,” Mr. Trump wrote on the social media platform Truth Social after federal agents picked up Mr. Khalil at his Manhattan apartment on March 8. Mr. Trump called pro-Palestinian activists like Mr. Khalil “terrorist sympathizers” and said “we will find, apprehend and deport” them, “never to return again.”
Another Columbia student, Leqaa Kordia was later detained for overstaying her visa, and yet another, Ranjani Srinivasan, left the country voluntarily after her visa was revoked.
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in the Northern District of New York, asks for national injunctions to block two executive orders issued in February. Both are aimed at the removal or arrest of pro-Palestinian activists or anyone else whom the administration deems guilty of antisemitic speech. A hearing could be held as soon as Monday, according to Mr. Taal’s lawyer, Eric Lee.
Two other plaintiffs — a professor and another student at Cornell who are both American citizens — joined Mr. Taal in the suit, arguing that the executive orders chill their rights to free speech.
Mr. Taal, 31, is a citizen of both Gambia and the United Kingdom. He has become known on the Cornell campus in Ithaca, N.Y., as a leading pro-Palestinian voice.
He faced disciplinary action from the university stemming from a protest at a job recruitment event at Cornell last year where weapons manufacturers were among the featured prospective employers. His involvement in that protest led Cornell to require that he study remotely this semester, but he retained his status as a student.
In the lawsuit, Mr. Taal argues that his activism has made him a target of the Trump administration’s plans, based partly on a list that was circulated by a pro-Zionist organization, Betar. According to the lawsuit, Betar submitted Mr. Taal’s name to lawmakers, including Senator John Fetterman, Democrat of Pennsylvania.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Fetterman said on Sunday that his office was not aware of having received such a list.
The lawsuit also cites an article in The Washington Free Beacon, a right-leaning publication, that named Mr. Taal as the most important student who could face possible deportation under Mr. Trump’s orders.
Annie Correal
The government of Venezuela has forcefully condemned the transfer of hundreds of Venezuelans to El Salvador and the Trump administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act. In a statement released Sunday, President Nicolás Maduro’s government said that the act flew in the face of U.S. and international laws, adding that the attempt to apply it “constitutes a crime against humanity.”
Annie Correal
The statement compared the transfer of Venezuelans to “the darkest episodes of human history,” including slavery and Nazi concentration camps. In particular, the government denounced what it called a threat to kidnap minors as young as 14 by labeling them as terrorists, claiming that the minors were “considered criminals simply for being Venezuelan.”
Annie Correal
The government’s statement blamed the United States for the mass migration of Venezuelans, saying years of sanctions — which have been imposed by the U.S. over Maduro’s autocratic rule — had driven its people to flee. It also blamed members of the opposition in Venezuela for working with the United States on what he called “unilateral coercive measures” against the Maduro regime.
Tyler Pager
When asked what his plans were if President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia did not agree to the U.S.-backed proposal for a cease-fire in Ukraine, President Trump said it would be “bad news” for the world. “But I think, I think he’s going to agree, I really do,” Trump said in an interview on the syndicated news program “Full Measure” that was taped Friday and aired Sunday.
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Tyler Pager
Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday defended the detention of Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University graduate and permanent legal resident of the United States, who was arrested by immigration authorities earlier this month. Rubio said Khalil was the negotiator for protesters who took over buildings at Columbia during demonstrations against the war in Gaza. “These guys take over entire buildings,” he said, speaking on CBS. “They vandalize colleges. They shut down colleges.” Rubio said the U.S. should have never allowed Khalil into the country.
Devlin BarrettAnnie Correal and William K. Rashbaum
Trump sent hundreds of Venezuelans to El Salvador in the face of a judge’s order.
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The Trump administration denied on Sunday that it had violated a court order by deporting hundreds of Venezuelan immigrants to a prison in El Salvador over the weekend, saying that the president had broad powers to quickly expel them under an 18th-century law meant for wartime.
The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, also asserted in a statement that the federal courts “have no jurisdiction” over the president’s conduct of foreign affairs or his power to expel foreign enemies.
“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,” she said in a statement. It was unclear why she referred to an aircraft carrier, because all indications were that the Venezuelans had been flown to El Salvador.
While White House officials exulted over what they see as a precedent-setting victory in their efforts to speed up deportations, the comments also tacitly acknowledge that the court battles over their legal rationale may be just beginning.
President Trump signed an executive order on Friday invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to rapidly arrest and deport those the administration identifies as members of the Tren de Aragua gang without many of the legal processes common in immigration cases. The enemies law allows for summary deportations of people from countries at war with the United States.
On Saturday, Judge James E. Boasberg of Federal District Court in Washington issued a temporary restraining order blocking the government from deporting any immigrants under the law after Mr. Trump’s order invoking it.
In a hastily scheduled hearing sought by the American Civil Liberties Union, the judge said he did not believe that federal law allowed the president’s action. He also ordered that any flights that had departed with Venezuelan immigrants under the executive order return to the United States “however that’s accomplished — whether turning around the plane or not.”
“This is something you need to make sure is complied with immediately,” he said.
Officials have not said when the deportation flights landed in El Salvador, but Ms. Leavitt insisted on Sunday that the migrants “had already been removed from U.S. territory” at the time of the judge’s order. She did not say whether the planes could have, as the judge ordered, turned around and returned to the United States.
El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, posted a three-minute video on social media of men in handcuffs being led off a plane during the night and marched into prison. The video also shows prison officials shaving the prisoners’ heads.
The Trump administration hopes that the unusual prisoner transfer deal — not a swap but an agreement for El Salvador to take those suspected of being gang members — will be the beginning of a larger effort to use the Alien Enemies Act.
That law, best known for its role in the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, has been invoked three times in U.S. history — during the War of 1812 and both World Wars — according to the Brennan Center for Justice, a law and policy organization. American officials familiar with the deal said that the United States would pay El Salvador about $6 million to house the prisoners.
During the hearing on Saturday, Judge Boasberg said he was ordering the government to turn flights around given “information, unrebutted by the government, that flights are actively departing.”
A lawyer representing the government, Drew Ensign, told Judge Boasberg that he did not have many details to share, and that describing operational details would raise “national security issues.”
The timing of the flights to El Salvador is important because Judge Boasberg issued his order shortly before 7 p.m. in Washington, but video posted from El Salvador shows the deportees disembarking the plane at night. El Salvador is two time zones behind Washington, which raises questions about whether the Trump administration had ignored an explicit court order.
Judge Boasberg’s order to turn flights around came after he told the government earlier on Saturday not to deport five Venezuelan men who were the initial focus of the legal fight. The Trump administration is appealing the judge’s order.
In a court filing, the Trump administration said the Departments of State and Homeland Security were “promptly notified” of the judge’s written order when it was posted to the electronic docket at 7:26 p.m. on Saturday.
The administration said that the five plaintiffs who filed suit to block their deportations — the suit that yielded the judge’s first order on Saturday — had not been deported.
The filing added that “some gang members subject to removal” by the president’s decree “had already been removed” from U.S. territory before Judge Boasberg issued the second, broader order.
On Sunday, Mr. Bukele posted a screenshot on social media about Judge Boasberg’s order and wrote, “Oopsie… Too late.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio later shared Mr. Bukele’s post from his personal account.
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Attorney General Pam Bondi criticized the judge on Saturday night in a statement, writing that he had sided with “terrorists over the safety of Americans,” and that his order “disregards well-established authority regarding President Trump’s power, and it puts the public and law enforcement at risk.”
On Sunday, the Venezuelan government denounced the transfer, saying that it flew in the face of U.S. and international laws and adding that the attempt to apply the Alien Enemies Act “constitutes a crime against humanity.”
The statement compared the transfer with “the darkest episodes of human history,” including slavery and Nazi concentration camps. In particular, Venezuela denounced what it called a threat to kidnap minors as young as 14 by labeling them as terrorists, claiming that the minors were “considered criminals simply for being Venezuelan.”
The government of Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, has presented an obstacle to the Trump administration as it plans to step up deportations — and to target people suspected of being Tren de Aragua members — because for years it has not regularly accepted deportation flights. In recent weeks, Mr. Maduro has gone back and forth on whether his government would accept such flights with Venezuelans from United States.
As a result, the Trump administration has sought alternative destinations, including the naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where it has sent some migrants, including those suspected of being gang members, though it has since removed them from the base.
In an unusual turn, El Salvador has presented Mr. Trump with another alternative.
In early February, while Mr. Rubio was visiting El Salvador, Mr. Bukele offered to take in deportees of any nationality, including convicted criminals, and jail them in part of El Salvador’s prison system, for a fee.
Mr. Rubio, who announced the offer at the time, said that Mr. Bukele had agreed to jail “any illegal alien in the United States who is a criminal of any nationality, whether from MS-13 or the Tren de Aragua.”
Officials from both the United States and El Salvador revealed that the deal with the Trump administration also included the transfer of suspected members of the Salvadoran gang MS-13 who were being held in the United States awaiting charges.
“We have sent 2 dangerous top MS-13 leaders plus 21 of its most wanted back to face justice in El Salvador,” Mr. Rubio posted on social media on Sunday. Mr. Rubio added that “over 250 alien enemy members of Tren de Aragua” had also been sent to El Salvador, which “has agreed to hold in their very good jails at a fair price.”
The two MS-13 men mentioned by Mr. Rubio were one accused of being a top leader, and one suspected of being a gang member.
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The first, Cesar Humberto Lopez-Larios, was among 14 of the gang’s highest-ranking leaders who were charged on Long Island in 2020. He was arrested last year in Texas and has since been in U.S. custody awaiting trial.
The second, Cesar Eliseo Sorto-Amaya, was arrested in February on charges that he had entered the United States illegally — for the fourth time since 2015. He was wanted on double aggravated homicide charges in El Salvador, where he had been sentenced in absentia to 50 years in prison. The U.S. charges against both men were dismissed on Tuesday, according to court records that were unsealed on Sunday.
Prosecutors wrote to the judge in Mr. Lopez-Larios’s case that the U.S. government had decided that “sensitive and important foreign policy considerations outweigh the government’s interest in pursuing the prosecution of the defendant.”
The two men’s transfers have raised concerns among some U.S. law enforcement officials, who fear that those individuals, once out of U.S. custody, could escape or issue orders that may endanger witnesses in both countries, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions.
Mr. Bukele came to power on promises to crack down on gang violence and MS-13. His success in restoring safety has won him broad support in El Salvador and around Latin America, but critics say that it has come at the cost of human rights.
By imposing a state of emergency, he has sidestepped due process and ordered sweeping arrests that have ensnared thousands of people without any affiliation to criminal groups, critics say. Under Mr. Bukele, the prison population has soared and abuses, including torture, have been documented in the system.
Mr. Bukele has promoted his iron-fisted approach by posting dramatic photographs from his country’s prisons that resemble those shared this weekend: They often feature scores of tattooed inmates with shaved heads held in handcuffs and forced into submissive poses.
Tim Balk contributed reporting.
A correction was made on
March 16, 2025
:
An earlier version of this article misstated the day U.S. charges against two men accused of being MS-13 members were dismissed. It was Tuesday, not Wednesday.
When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know at nytnews@nytimes.com.Learn more
Tyler Pager
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Sunday that “there are no guarantees” there won’t be a recession, as he defended the administration’s tariff strategy. “I am confident that the American people will come our way,” he said on “Meet the Press” on NBC. Bessent also dismissed the turmoil in the stock market last week. “I’m not worried about the markets,” he said. “Over the long term, if we put good tax policy in place, deregulation and energy security, the markets will do great.”
Tyler Pager
“I’ve been in the investment business for 35 years, and I can tell you that corrections are healthy,” Bessent said.
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Carol Rosenberg
Michael Waltz, President Trump’s national security adviser, has described the U.S. attacks on targets in Yemen on Saturday as both successful and effective. “We hit the Houthi leadership, killing several of their key leaders last night, their infrastructure, the missiles,” he said on “Fox News Sunday.” He cast the Houthis as “essentially Al Qaeda with sophisticated Iranian-backed air defenses and anti-ship cruise missiles and drones that has attacked the entire global economy.”
Carol Rosenberg
“All options are on the table,” Waltz said in response to a question on “Fox News Sunday” about whether President Trump would move ahead with new sanctions on Russia this week, as the administraton tries to pressure President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to agree to a cease-fire in Ukraine. “He has put that out there on the table. And he has also put out a broader and different bilateral relationship with Russia on the table.”
Tyler Pager
Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, said he expects Trump and Putin to speak this week as the U.S. tries to finalize a monthlong cease-fire deal between Russia and Ukraine. Speaking on CNN, Witkoff said he had a positive meeting with Putin last week that lasted between three and four hours. He declined to share the specifics of their conversation, but he said he remains optimistic that a deal is within reach.
Enjoli Liston
President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador posted on social media on Sunday morning saying that “the first 238 members” of the Tren de Aragua gang had arrived in the country. “The United States will pay a very low fee for them, but a high one for us,” he wrote, in an apparent reference to the agreement mentioned by Rubio.
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Enjoli Liston
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a post on social media this morning that the Trump administration had sent two “top MS-13 leaders plus 21 of its most wanted back to face justice” in El Salvador. He said the Trump administration had also sent more than 250 members of the transnational gang, Tren de Aragua.
Enjoli Liston
Rubio said that El Salvador had agreed to hold the gang members “in their very good jails at a fair price that will also save our taxpayer dollars.” He thanked and praised President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador, calling him “a great friend of the U.S.”
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Eve Sampson
A gang with roots in a Venezuelan prison is at the center of President Trump’s order invoking the Alien Enemies Act.
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President Trump’s executive order on Saturday invoking the Alien Enemies Act targeted Venezuelan citizens 14 years and older with ties to the transnational gang Tren de Aragua, saying they “are liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed as Alien Enemies.”
Mr. Trump’s order was quickly challenged in court, but the gang has been a growing source of concern for U.S. officials over the last year. The Biden administration labeled Tren de Aragua a transnational criminal organization in 2024, the New York Police Department has highlighted its activity on the East Coast, and the Trump White House began the process of designating it a foreign terrorist organization in January.
Here is what we know about the gang:
A rising force out of Venezuela
Tren de Aragua (Train of Aragua, or Aragua Train) has roots in Tocorón prison in Venezuela’s northern Aragua state, which the group’s leaders had transformed into a mini-city with a pool, restaurants and a zoo. They reportedly recorded executions and torture there to maintain control over other prisoners.
As Venezuela’s economy collapsed and its government under President Nicolás Maduro became more repressive, the group began exploiting vulnerable migrants. Tren de Aragua’s influence soon stretched into other parts of Latin America, and it developed into one of the region’s most violent and notorious criminal organizations, focusing on sex trafficking, human smuggling and drugs.
Colombian officials in 2022 accused the gang of at least 23 murders after the police began to find body parts in bags. Alleged members have also been apprehended in Chile and in Brazil, where the gang aligned itself with Primeiro Comando da Capital, one of that country’s biggest organized crime rings.
A recent entry to the United States
Despite the many unknowns about its true size or sophistication in the United States, Tren de Aragua has emerged as a real source of concern for law enforcement in the last couple of years.
In New York City, according to the police the gang has focused on stealing cellphones; retail thefts, especially high-end merchandise in department stores and thefts while riding scooters; and dealing a pink, powdery synthetic drug, known as Tusi, that is often laced with ketamine, MDMA or fentanyl.
The police have also said that the gang is believed to recruit members from inside the city’s migrant shelters, and has variously had conflicts or made alliances with other gangs.
In other parts of the country, people accused of affiliations with Tren de Aragua have been charged with crimes such as shootings and human trafficking, mostly targeting members of the Venezuelan community.
In May 2024, federal officials uncovered a sex-trafficking ring in which they said the gang was forcing Venezuelan women into sex to repay debts to smugglers who assisted with border crossings. The ring stretched across Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Florida and New Jersey, according to a complaint filed in federal court.
The group’s presence in the United States was a flashpoint of the 2024 election, as Mr. Trump accused the Biden administration of letting criminals into the country. During a presidential debate, he falsely suggested that the gang had taken over Aurora, Colo.
A source of stigma for migrants
The Trump administration has repeatedly described Tren de Aragua as a focus of its deportation efforts. Venezuelan migrants seeking asylum say the gang’s presence and the discourse around it in the United States have created hurtful stigma and discrimination against them.
“Any of us who have tattoos, they think that we are Tren de Aragua,” said Evelyn Velasquez, 33-year-old Venezuelan woman, told The New York Times in September. “I’ll go apply for a job and when they hear that we are Venezuelan, they turn us down.”
In February, the White House press secretary said that 10 men detained and housed in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba were members of Tren de Aragua. The sister of one of the men detained said that he was not a gang member.
In late February, the Trump administration abruptly emptied two detention sites the government had used to hold 177 Venezuelans flown in from the United States, including a military prison building formerly used to hold terrorism detainees. Federal officials moved out a second group of migrants this month.
Tim Balk
The president ordered deportations under the Alien Enemies Act, a rarely used 1798 law.
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A federal judge on Saturday ordered the Trump administration to cease use of an obscure wartime law to deport Venezuelans without a hearing, saying that any planes that had departed the United States with immigrants under the law needed to return.
On Saturday, the administration published an executive order invoking the law, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, to target Venezuelan gang members in the United States.
But shortly after the announcement, James E. Boasberg, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., said he would issue a temporary order blocking the government from deporting any immigrants under the law.
In a hastily scheduled hearing, he said he did not believe the law offered grounds for the president’s action, and he ordered any flights that had departed with Venezuelan immigrants under the executive order to return to the United States “however that’s accomplished — whether turning around the plane or not.”
“This is something you need to make sure is complied with immediately,” he directed the government.
Lee Gelernt, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, which sued over the executive order, said in an interview after the hearing that he believed two flights were “in the air” on Saturday evening.
During the hearing, Judge Boasberg said he was ordering the government to turn flights around given “information, unrebutted by the government, that flights are actively departing.”
A lawyer representing the government, Drew Ensign, told the judge that he did not have many details to share and that describing operational details would raise “national security issues.”
After the hearing, the government filed an appeal. In a statement late Saturday, Attorney General Pam Bondi said the judge had put “terrorists over the safety of Americans” and placed “the public and law enforcement at risk.”
“The Department of Justice is undeterred in its efforts to work with the White House, the Department of Homeland Security, and all of our partners to stop this invasion and Make America Safe Again,” she added.
The president’s order, dated Friday, declared that Venezuelans who are at least 14 years old, in the United States without authorization and part of the Tren de Aragua gang are “liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured and removed.”
The Alien Enemies Act allows for summary deportations of people from countries at war with the United States. The law, best known for its role in the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, has been invoked three times in U.S. history — during the War of 1812, World War I and World War II — according to the Brennan Center for Justice, a law and policy organization.
Hours before the White House published its proclamation, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit on behalf of five Venezuelan men seeking to block the president from invoking the law. All five men were accused of having links to Tren de Aragua but deny that they are in the gang, Mr. Gelernt said. One of the men was arrested, the lawsuit said, because an immigration officer “erroneously” believed he was a member of Tren de Aragua because of his tattoos.
Judge Boasberg initially issued a limited order on Saturday blocking the government from deporting the five men.
The Trump administration promptly filed an appeal of the order, and the A.C.L.U. asked the judge to broaden his order to apply to all immigrants at risk of deportation under the Alien Enemies Act. At the hearing Saturday evening, Judge Boasberg said he would issue a broader order applying to all “noncitizens in U.S. custody.”
In the lawsuit, lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union wrote that the Venezuelans believed that they faced an immediate risk of deportation. “The government’s proclamation would allow agents to immediately put noncitizens on planes,” the lawsuit said, adding that the law “plainly only applies to warlike actions” and “cannot be used here against nationals of a country — Venezuela — with whom the United States is not at war.”
The judge agreed, saying that he believed the terms “invasion” and “predatory incursion” in the law “really relate to hostile acts perpetrated by enemy nations.”
The White House and the Homeland Security Department, which runs the nation’s immigration system and was named in the lawsuit, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Noah Feldman, a constitutional law professor at Harvard, said the fate of the case, which could ultimately wind up at the Supreme Court, would hinge on “how much deference the courts pay to the president’s determination that there’s a threatened incursion.” Judges would have to make that determination “without a lot of precedent,” Professor Feldman added.
President Trump, who campaigned last year on a promise to initiate the largest deportation operation in U.S. history, has often referred to the arrivals of unauthorized immigrants as an “invasion.” One of the first executive orders he issued after returning to the White House was titled, “Protecting the American People Against Invasion.”
His proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act appeared to be narrowly focused on Tren de Aragua, a gang that emerged from a Venezuelan prison and grew into a criminal organization focused on sex trafficking, drug dealing and human smuggling.
But if the Trump administration’s interpretation of the law is ultimately upheld, it could empower the administration to remove other immigrants age 14 or older without a court hearing. That would enable the extraordinary move of arresting, detaining and deporting immigrant minors without the due process afforded to immigrants for decades.
Skye Perryman, president of Democracy Forward, a legal group that joined the A.C.L.U. in submitting the challenge to the executive order, said in a statement that Saturday was a “horrific day in the history of the nation, when the president publicized that he was seeking to invoke extraordinary wartime powers in the absence of a war or invasion.”
Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Glenn Thrush contributed reporting.
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Noah Weiland and Tyler Pager
Noah Weiland reported from Washington, and Tyler Pager from Palm Beach, Fla.
Adam Boehler, Trump’s pick to run hostage negotiations, was withdrawn from consideration.
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The White House withdrew the nomination of Adam Boehler to serve as the special presidential envoy for hostage affairs, but officials said he would continue working as a so-called special government employee on the Trump administration’s efforts to free Americans held overseas.
“He will continue this important work to bring wrongfully detained individuals around the world home,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said in a statement on Saturday.
Ms. Leavitt added that Mr. Boehler had played a “critical role” in the February release of Marc Fogel, a teacher who was arrested on charges of bringing medical marijuana into Russia in August 2021.
Mr. Boehler, a health care entrepreneur and close ally of Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, has had a roving presence in the White House during both of Mr. Trump’s terms. In 2020, he worked on the federal government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic, helping coordinate emergency response efforts and the Trump administration’s coronavirus vaccine development initiative, Operation Warp Speed.
Dustin Stewart, who served in the Biden administration as the deputy special envoy for hostage affairs and has worked closely with Mr. Boehler in recent months, was expected to continue serving as the acting special envoy until the Trump administration decides who should hold the job permanently, a senior administration official said.
Mr. Boehler asked to be withdrawn from consideration for the job, according to two senior administration officials, in part because he did not want to divest from his health care investment firm, which would have been required for the Senate-confirmed position. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss personnel matters.
A special government employee is an executive branch appointee named to “perform important, but limited, services to the government, with or without compensation, for a period not to exceed 130 days” during a one-year period. Elon Musk, who is leading the cost-cutting initiative known as the Department of Government Efficiency, is also a special government employee.
Mr. Boehler is expected to still have broad latitude to work on hostage negotiations from his State Department office, one official said.
Mr. Rubio asked Mr. Boehler this month to meet with senior Hamas leaders in Qatar, an attempt to jump-start cease-fire talks and secure the release of Edan Alexander, the last remaining Israeli American captive believed to be alive, and the bodies of four others. The talks did not produce an agreement, and Mr. Rubio referred to them as a “one-off.”
The talks broke with the United States’ practice of refusing to negotiate directly with Hamas, which the State Department has designated as a terrorist group. And they upset Israeli officials, who were surprised by the visit. Ron Dermer, a close adviser to Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, confronted Mr. Boehler in a phone call over the Hamas talks, according to a senior administration official.
Mr. Boehler was also heavily involved in the release this week of American prisoners held in Kuwait on drug charges.
