Border czar Tom Homan on Sunday said the Trump administration is confident that all of the migrants it deported to El Salvador’s apocalyptic prisons are Venezuelan gangbangers.
President Trump invoked the 18th-century Alien Enemies Act to fly the alleged members of the notorious Tren de Aragua gang to prisons in El Salvador.
Those efforts have since been paused by the courts over concerns about due process. Many of the migrants on those flights did not have a documented criminal history in the US, according to court filings from an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official.
“A lot of gang members don’t have criminal histories,” Homan said on ABC News’ “This Week.”
“Just like a lot of terrorists in this world, they’re not in any terrorist database, right?” he said.
“But the bottom line is, that plane was full of people designated as terrorists, number one,” Homan said, referring to the fact that the group was of reputed members of a gang designated by the US as a “foreign terrorist organization.”
“Number two, every Venezuelan migrant on that flight was a TdA member based on numerous criminal investigation[s] [or] intelligence reports and a lot of work by ICE officers,” Homan said.
Host Jonathan Karl pointed to the viral allegations from Jerce Reyes Barrios’ lawyer that he was erroneously deported because of his Real Madrid soccer team’s logo tattoo, something the Department of Homeland Security disputes.
Homan countered that all of those concerns will be litigated.
The border czar also underscored that US government officials “who’ve done this for decades looked at the intelligence information” and “are confident that they’re all members of the TdA.
Homan, asked about the migrants’ ability to challenge the accusations against them, fired back, “Due process?
“Where was Laken Riley’s due process?” he said, referring to the 22-year-old Georgia nursing student killed by an illegal Venezuelan migrant last year.
So far, the Trump administration has flown 260 illegal migrants to El Salvador’s brutal mega-prison system.
US District Judge James Boasberg then ordered the Trump administration to halt flights to El Salvador and turn around planes that had been en route when his ruling came down.
Now he’s scrutinizing concerns that the Trump administration defied his orders at some point.
The key legal issue is Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act to conduct the deportations rather than the normal channels.
The Alien Enemies Act has rarely been used in US history, most recently by former President Franklin D. Roosevelt to apprehend 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II.
Trump’s critics argue that the statute requires the US to be at war with another nation to be invoked.
“I understand this case is in litigation through the Alien Enemies Act, and we’ll abide by the court order as litigated,” Homan said. “We’re not making this up. The Alien Enemies Act was actually a federal law, it’s a statute, enacted by Congress and signed by a president.”
Homan doubled down on a previous statement in which he said, “I don’t care what judges think” but clarified Sunday, “My point was, despite what [the jurist] thinks, we’re going to keep targeting the worst of the worst, which we’ve been doing since Day One.”
