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Notes -
With all the lawsuits against the Trump administration currently ongoing it can be hard to keep up with all the legal developments but I wanted to highlight one that seems particularly strange. We discussed some last week about the case J.G.G. v. Trump, this being the case of Venezuelans deported under the Alien Enemies Act. Yesterday the government filed a notice with the court that the government was invoking the state secrets privilege over the questions the court had asked with respect to compliance with this order. What renders this farcical, to me, is that it seems like almost all the information the judge wants is straightforwardly publicly available? A reminder of the judge's questions, taken from Attorney General Pam Bondi's declaration:
Can we answer (1)? It seems like yes. People have identified what certainly seem like the tail numbers for the flights in question. So much so that the Associated Press and Reuters have reconstructions of the timeline based on flight data. You can even look them up yourself! Here is flight N278GX, for example. You can see in its flight history that it departed Valley International Airport in Harlingten TX at around 4:26 PM CDT, bound for Comayagua International Airport in Honduras. It then departed Comayagua International Airport at 9:41 PM CST and arrived at El Salvador International Airport at 10:05 PM CST. The plane then departed El Salvador International Airport for Valley International Airport at 2:50 AM CST the next day. So we have the answer to (1) and (3) very straightforwardly. (2) can probably be derived with some math and knowing the flight route from Valley International to Comayagua International. The answer to (4), I imagine, can be narrowed to the 5 hour window after the flight arrived in El Salvador and before it departed. The planes in question are both Airbus A320, which have a typical passenger capacity in the 150-200 range which gives us some bounds on (5).
Did I reveal state secrets by making this post? Did the AP or Reuters do so by making their posts? According to the precedent's the government cites in their Notice invoking the privilege public disclosure of the secrets in question does not necessarily defeat the invocation, so it may be that the government does not answer the judge's questions after all.
Anyway, separate from the above the government has until the end of day today to file a brief as to why they should not be sanctioned for violating the court's TRO. Should be an interesting read!
What caught my eye in recent filings is the accusation that the Salvadorian Government refused to accept female deportees, even going so far as making the US Government return female inmates to the United States.
I can sort of see how this could happen. The original Alien Enemies Act of 1798 only applied to males aged 14 and up. The amended version currently on the books was updated during WWI to include all persons aged 14 and up. Maybe they accidentally cited the 1798 version during negotiations with Bukele. That would only be the second most embarrassing foreign policy blunder this week.
What catches my eye in that filing is that one of the men so deported was actually Nicaraguan. Venezuelan women could be subject to deportation under the AEA and Trump's proclamation (though apparently not to El Salvador), but no Nicaraguan would be. These are the people the Trump administration argues have no right to have any kind of hearing or due process before they are deported under the AEA, even if they legally can't be apparently.
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