All aboard the Trump Tren!
The Trump administration is paying $6 million to El Salvador to take in around 300 soon-to-be deported members of the notorious Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua — and throw them in its mega-prison for at least a year.
Nayib Bukele, the president of the Central American nation, reached an agreement with Secretary of State Marco Rubio to begin extraditing criminal migrants and other gangbangers who have illegally entered the US, per a memo from El Salvador’s foreign affairs ministry obtained by the Associated Press.
Hundreds of Tren de Aragua members will be kept for one year in El Salvador’s mega-prison, Terrorism Confinement Center — which houses 40,000 inmates, according to the memo.
A high-ranking leader of the MS-13 gang will also be removed, along with another member of the group convicted of double homicide in El Salvador before he illegally crossed into the US.
The arrangement is one of the first cases of the Central American country taking migrants from the US.
In February, Bukele offered up the maximum-security prison for President Trump’s mass deportations for a “relatively low” price.
President Trump had been preparing this week to speed up the process by invoking a war-time authority to deport the criminal migrants before a federal judge temporarily blocked use of that power on five Venezuelan nationals in a lawsuit filed before a DC federal court.
Washington, DC, US District Chief Judge James Boasberg barred officials Saturday from implementing the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 after the American Civil Liberties Union and Democracy Forward went to bat for five Venezuelan nationals allegedly in deportation proceedings by federal immigration authorities.
Attorneys for the lefty legal groups claim that the Venezuelans, who are being held at the El Valle Detention Center in Texas, had been mistaken for members or associates of Tren de Aragua.
“Upon information and belief, the government has transferred Venezuelans who are in ongoing immigration proceedings in other states, bringing them to Texas to prepare to summarily remove them and to do so before any judicial review—including by this Court,” the attorneys wrote.
“For that reason, Plaintiffs-Petitioners and the putative class that they represent seek this Court’s intervention to temporarily restrain these summary removals, and to determine that this use of the AEA is unlawful and must be stopped.”
The DC jurist ordered Justice Department attorneys and the groups representing the Venezuelans to appear for a 5 p.m. hearing later on Saturday, per court filings.
The 18th century law was only been acted upon after formal US declarations of war were made in the War of 1812, World War I and World War II. Former President Franklin D. Roosevelt the last commander-in-chief to make use of it.
The Post reached out to the State Department, Bukele’s office and Department of Homeland Security for comment.
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