2025-03-18
16 分钟On Friday, President Donald Trump signed a proclamation in secret.
In it, he invoked an obscure law, the Alien enemies Act of 1798.
It's a sprawling wartime power that hasn't been used since World War II.
Then, over the weekend, the administration used this power to deport more than 100 Venezuelan migrants.
The White House claimed they belonged to the gang Trende Aragua.
These migrants received no immigration hearing and no due process.
They're now stranded in a mega prison in El Salvador.
From the newsroom of the Washington Post, this is Post Reports.
I'm Colby IKOWICZ.
It's Monday, March 17th.
Today, the alien Enemies Act.
I'm sitting down with immigration reporter Marianne Levine to talk about how the Trump administration used this wartime power to deport migrants and how they apparently defied a judge to do it.
Marianne, I know you were really busy over the weekend.
Could you just start by giving us a play by play of all the events that unfolded?
So we had been hearing for, for some time that President Trump planned to invoke the Alien Enemies act to speed up deportations of migrants.
And Trump had talked about this law on the campaign trail.
He had talked about it during his inaugural address.
So this was something that many immigrant advocates were ready for and were anticipating.
So we see that Saturday morning, the ACLU and Democracy Forward foundation file the lawsuit against the Trump administration, essentially trying to preemptively stop the administration from using this wartime law.
And as the day unfolds, we then see that the White House has actually posted publicly that Trump has already invoked the law and that he had invoked it for Friday night and had signed it Friday night, but the White House did not officially or publicly announce it until Saturday.