The Department of Homeland Security argued to a federal judge in Massachusetts that it did not violate his order, which modified the process of deporting certain migrants, because a different federal department carried out the removals.
The DHS told Judge Brian Murphy that because his order applied only to the named defendants in the case he presided over, the government remained compliant with the court. The defendants include the DHS, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem.
Last month, Murphy, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, sided with immigration lawyers who filed a class action lawsuit against the government on behalf of four migrants who they said were at risk of being deported without appropriate due process or had already been wrongly deported.
Murphy responded by granting an order that did not stop the DHS from carrying out deportations but rather put a stipulation on removing any migrants who had received final orders of removal from an immigration judge. The order required the DHS to give “meaningful notice” to those migrants if the department planned to deport them to a country other than the one listed on their final orders of removal.
When the immigration attorneys identified several foreign nationals who they said were deported without that level of notice, government attorneys responded that the Department of Defense had deported them rather than the DHS.
One migrant was a registered sex offender in New York. Another migrant was an “identified Tren de Aragua (TdA) gang member” and was deported to El Salvador “by the Department of Defense on a flight with no DHS personnel onboard,” government attorneys said.
“DHS did not direct the Department of Defense” to remove them, the attorneys said, adding, “The Department of Defense is not a defendant in this action.”
A declaration submitted by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official indicated that the DHS had transferred them to Guantanamo Bay, a U.S.-run detention camp off the coast of Cuba, and that the DoD deported them from there to another country within a couple of days.
HOW THE LEFT FUNDS THE LEGAL INDUSTRY SHIELDING MIGRANTS FROM DEPORTATION
The lawsuit comes as Trump’s aggressive deportation operations face legal scrutiny in courtrooms across the country. The lawsuits, led largely by groups funded by liberal entities, primarily question whether the administration is giving the appropriate amount of legal notice to migrants before deporting them and whether it is accurately identifying some of them as members of transnational gangs before using that designation to deport them quickly to foreign prisons.
The president’s decision to invoke the Alien Enemies Act against Tren de Aragua members last month became a top source of controversy, leading to a sprawling set of lawsuits playing out in numerous states before the Supreme Court stepped in this weekend and temporarily blocked Trump from using it.