Judge says migrants sent to El Salvador prison must get a chance to challenge their removals

Prisoners look out of their cell as Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem tours the Terrorist Confinement Center in Tecoluca, El Salvador, March 26, 2025. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)

WASHINGTON — A U.S. federal judge ruled on Wednesday that the Trump administration must give more than 100 migrants sent to a notorious prison in El Salvador a chance to challenge their deportations.

U.S. District Court Chief Judge James Boasberg said that people who were sent to the prison in March under an 18th-century wartime law haven’t been able to formally contest the removals or allegations that they are members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. He ordered the administration to work toward giving them a way to file those challenges.

The judge wrote that “significant evidence” has surfaced indicating that many of the migrants imprisoned in El Salvador are not connected to the gang “and thus languish in a foreign prison on flimsy, even frivolous, accusations.”

Boasberg gave the administration one week to come up with a manner in which the “at least 137” people can make those claims, even while they’re formally in the custody of El Salvador. It’s the latest milestone in the monthslong legal saga over the fate of deportees imprisoned at El Salvador’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center.

After Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 in March and prepared to fly planeloads of accused gang members to El Salvador and out of the jurisdiction of U.S. courts, Boasberg ordered them to turn the planes around. This demand was ignored. Boasberg has found probably cause that the administration committed contempt of court after the flight landed. El Salvador President Nayib Bukele posted a taunting message on social media -- reposted by some of Trump’s top aides -- that read “Oopsie, too late.”

The U.S. Supreme Court later ruled that anyone targeted under the AEA has the right to appeal to a judge to contest their designation as an enemy of the state. Boasberg, in his latest, ruling wrote that he was simply applying that principle to those who’d been removed.

Boasberg said the administration “plainly deprived” the immigrants of a chance to challenge their removals before they were put on flights. Therefore, he says the government must handle the migrants cases now as if they “would have been if the Government had not provided constitutionally inadequate process.”

The Department of Justice did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The administration and its supporters have targeted Boasberg for his initial order halting deportations and his contempt inquiry, part of their growing battle with the judiciary as it puts the brakes on Trump’s efforts to unilaterally remake government. The fight has been particularly harsh in the realm of immigration, where Trump has repeatedly said it’d be impossible to protect the country from dangerous immigrants if each one has his or her day in court.

“We cannot give everyone a trial!” the president posted on his social media site, Truth Social, after the Supreme Court intervened a second time in the AEA saga, halting a possible effort to evade its initial ruling by temporarily freezing deportations from northern Texas.

Boasberg wrote that he accepted the administration’s declaration, filed under seal, providing details of the government’s deal with El Salvador to house deportees and how that means the Venezuelans are technically under the legal control of El Salvador and not the United States. He added, while noting there is a criminal penalty for providing false testimony, that believing those representations was “rendered more difficult given the Government’s troubling conduct throughout this case.”

He also noted parallels with another case where the Trump administration admitted it mistakenly deported a Maryland man to El Salvador and has been ordered by a judge, appellate judges and the U.S. Supreme Court to “facilitate” his return.

That man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, remains in El Salvador more than two months later.

ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt welcomed Boasberg’s ruling.

“This is a significant step forward to getting these men the chance to show that they should not ever have been removed under a wartime authority,” Gelernt told reporters in San Diego after a hearing in an unrelated case.

Boasberg’s order is only the latest of a blizzard of legal rulings in the sprawling AEA case.

Several judges have temporarily halted deportations under the act in parts of Texas, New York, California, Pennsylvania and elsewhere, finding the administration’s 24 hour window that it gave detainees to challenge their designation under the act did not meet the Supreme Court’s requirement of providing a “reasonable” chance to seek relief. Deportations of people in the country illegally can continue in those areas under laws other than the AEA,

Some of the judges in those cases have also found that Trump cannot use the act to target a criminal gang rather than a state, noting that the act has only been invoked three prior times in history -- during the War of 1812 and during First and Second World Wars.

The Supreme Court will likely eventually decide those issues. The Trump administration contends that the gang is acting as a shadow arm of Venezuela’s government

Riccardi reported from Denver. Alanna Durkin Richer in Washington, D.C. contributed to this report.

Nicholas Riccardi And Lindsay Whitehurst, The Associated Press