How Trump Snuck His Mass Deportations Past the Courts

Donald Trump’s sinister plan to deport noncitizens under the Alien Enemies Act included several steps specifically designed to help evade judicial review, Talking Points Memo reported Wednesday.

It all began weeks before the secretive deportations on March 15 took place, when Trump entered office and immediately signed an executive order labeling Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua as a terrorist organization. This helped to set the stage for the president to invoke the Alien Enemies Act, suspending alleged members’ due process to deport them.

As soon as early February, Immigration and Customs Enforcement began arresting Venezuelan asylum-seekers. In several cases, individuals were detained at their regular check-ins with federal authorities and brought into ICE custody on the basis of their supposedly suspicious tattoos.

“From there, no further due process or examination to determine whether these people were actually TdA members appears to have taken place,” TPM reported.

The White House claimed that authorities had determined beyond a doubt that the more than 100 Venezuelans deported to El Salvador earlier were “terrorist” members of the TdA but refused to reveal operational details of how they were able to determine this. Trump’s border czar Tom Homan claimed that authorities had used social media, surveillance, sworn statements from gang members, and wire taps to determine supposed gang affiliation.

Over the course of the next month, the alleged members of TdA were slowly moved closer and closer to the airfield in South Texas where the flights to El Salvador departed, according to multiple immigration attorneys who spoke with TPM.

One soon-to-be deported Venezuelan missed an immigration court hearing in Elizabeth, New Jersey, because he had been inexplicably moved to a detention facility in South Texas. Others were moved from Pennsylvania, California, and Louisiana. Attorneys struggled to keep track of their clients as they were slowly arranged, ahead of Trump’s invocation of the AEA, like dominoes to fall.

The night before the flights took off, the Venezuelans received misleading information about where they were actually going. One group was placed on an aircraft and told they were going back to Venezuela.

Attorney Martin Rosenow was in disbelief when he received a tearful phone call from his client’s wife, saying her husband was being deported back to Venezuela.

“For me, it was impossible, because he still had an open asylum pending and you can’t be deported without being given due process. So at first I told her, ‘You know what? I think he’s just being transferred to another facility because his case is still ongoing,’” Rosenow told TPM. “It’s impossible that he’d be deported.”

Both Rosenow and the family were left confused and unprepared to challenge his client’s subsequent deportation to a torture prison in El Salvador.

Crucially, family members and attorneys were not made aware of the removal of their loved ones and clients, making it impossible to challenge their removal.

John Dutton, an attorney for one of the Venezuelan nationals, told TPM that it seemed to him that every move had been purposefully orchestrated. “They knew that what they were doing was wrong,” Dutton said. “The way they did it, how they did it, in the middle of the night, how they didn’t allow them to tell their families. They didn’t tell them. They didn’t tell us as attorneys.”

Still, rumors that Trump had invoked the AEA circulated, and at 2 a.m. on March 15, Lee Gelernt, an ACLU attorney, filed suit to block their removals. While the White House said the AEA order was signed on March 14, it did not appear on the government’s website until 3:53 p.m. the next day.

Within only hours of its posting, two flights departed, carrying more than 100 Venezuelans nationals, who had not been afforded their due process rights to a hearing, out of the country.

All of these measures indicate that the government took extensive steps to strip noncitizens of their rights ahead of their deportation. As Judge James Boasberg wrote in an order Monday, the speed at which the deportees were removed “implied a desire to circumvent judicial review.”

Representative Chrissy Houlahan cornered National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard during a House Intelligence Committee hearing Wednesday, committing the intelligence chief to “follow the law” and investigate the Trump administration’s Signal leak regarding plans to attack Houthi targets in Yemen.

“This committee established something called 50 USC 3235a, and this committee—on a bipartisan, a-partisan basis—requires you, the DNI, to swiftly notify Congress and the Intelligence Committee if you’re aware of any sort of significant unauthorized disclosure or compromise of classified information, which I would argue has all the markings of being that,” Houlahan said. “And so, if you as the DNI chief see such a thing, anywhere within your organizations of purview, you have an obligation to report back to us on that.

“Would this qualify to you as something worthy of that investigation?” Houlahan pressed.

Gabbard deferred that responsibility to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, claiming that only he had the authority to classify Defense Department information.

“This chat did not have the auspice of being a DOD chat. There’s no such thing as labeling it as DOD. This was a chat among a great variety of people,” Houlahan retorted, pressing that Gabbard had a legal obligation to report and investigate leaked information.

“Do you not think it’s important to do such a thing?” Houlahan said.

“The National Security Council is investigating this inadvertent leak,” Gabbard said, referring to the probe fronted by national security adviser Mike Waltz, the Trump admin official responsible for creating the Signal chat room and adding The Atlantic’s editor in chief in the first place.

The former Democratic presidential candidate then proceeded to point her finger back at Hegseth, before Houlahan cut Gabbard off to argue that Hegseth should “walk his resignation in” and is “probably headed toward being relieved of his duty based on what I think are significant and illegal leaks.

“I would like it if you would please commit to this organization that you will follow the law, and I would like it if you would also investigate what is likely to be more than just this chat, because if there’s one, there’s more than one. If there’s smoke, there’s fire,” Houlahan continued. “Would you please commit yourself to that investigation?”

“Congresswoman, yes, I will follow the law,” Gabbard said.

Houlahan, a Pennsylvania Democrat, is an Air Force veteran and serves on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, as well as the House Armed Services Committee.

Representative Jimmy Gomez and CIA Director John Ratcliffe got into a fiery exchange on Wednesday as a House intel hearing turned to the topic of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s drinking problem—and whether it played a part in Signalgate.

“The main person who was involved in this thread, that a lot of people want to talk to, is Secretary of Defense Hegseth, and a lot of questions were brought up regarding his drinking habits in his confirmation hearing” Gomez said, directed at Ratcliffe and National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard. “To your knowledge, do you know whether Pete Hegseth had been drinking before he leaked classified information?”

“I don’t have any knowledge of Secretary Hegseth’s personal habits,” Gabbard responded, avoiding the question entirely.

“Director Ratcliffe, same question. Yes or no?”

“I think that’s an offensive line of questioning; the answer is no,” Ratcliffe replied, clearly perturbed. “I find it interesting that you want to—”

“Hey! I yield back—”

“You don’t want to focus on the good work that the CIA is doing, that the intelligence community is doing—”

“Director, I reclaim my time, director, I reclaim my time,” Gomez said. “I have huge respect for the CIA, huge respect for our men and women in uniform. But this was a question that’s at the top of the minds of every American. He stood in front of a podium in Europe holding a drink! So of course we want to know if his performance is compromised.”

“You want to talk about accepting responsibility? Do you think we accept a successful strike to make Americans safer?” Ratcliffe retorted.

“Here’s the thing. This is serious. We’ve been briefed in this committee about using Signal,” Gomez said. “We know that your people are—Russian, Chinese are on your phone.”

This back-and-forth comes on day two of the fallout from The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, being added to a Signal chat with Vice President JD Vance and President Trump’s top Defense Cabinet members planning an attack on Yemen.

If you ever find yourself caught in a clear lie about a group chat to plan an attack on Yemen, the solution is easy: Pretend you can’t remember a thing.

During a House Intelligence Committee hearing Wednesday, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard attempted to walk back her previous claim that there had been “no classified information” shared in the Signal group chat used by officials to plot a bombing in Yemen.

Her defense? She claimed she hadn’t remembered.

“My answer yesterday was based on my recollection—or lack thereof—of the details that were posted there,” Gabbard said.

“I was not—and what was shared today reflects the fact that I was not—directly involved with that part of the Signal chat. And replied at the end reflecting the effects, the very brief effects that the national security adviser had shared,” she said.

Gabbard was referring to the one message she had sent in the chat on March 15, after the bombs had already dropped. “Great work and effects!” she wrote.

But Representative Jim Himes wasn’t buying it.

“So it’s your testimony that less than two weeks ago you were on a Signal chat that had all of this information about F18s and MQ9 reapers and targets on strike, and you, in that two-week period, simply forgot that that was there?” he asked.

“My testimony is I did not recall the exact details of what was included there,” Gabbard said.

“That was not your testimony,” the Connecticut Democrat replied, referring to Gabbard’s comments in a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Tuesday. “Your testimony was that you were not aware of anything related to weapons packages, targets, and timing.”

Gabbard claimed later in Wednesday’s hearing she had acknowledged that there were conversations about weapons—but she ironically claimed she couldn’t remember what she’d said even just one day earlier.

When asked Tuesday by Senator Mark Kelly whether the chat had mentioned timings, units, targets, or weapons involved in the strike on the Houthis, Gabbard had responded, “I don’t remember a mention of specific targets. I believe there was discussion around targets, in general.”

This wasn’t the only time Wednesday Gabbard claimed memory problems to evade a question. Representative Jason Crow asked Gabbard where she had been traveling during the discussion, and she had a similarly weak answer.

“I was traveling through the Asian Pacific region, I don’t recall which country I was in at that time,” Gabbard answered.

“You don’t remember the country?” the Colorado Democrat pressed.

“I’d have to go back and look at the schedule,” Gabbard said.

During the duration of the group chat, Gabbard reportedly traveled between Hawaii, Japan, and Thailand before visiting India, where she delivered a keynote address at the Raisina Dialogue on March 18.

There has been some concern that the chat could have been accessed by non-U.S. actors. Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, was in Russia while sensitive messages swirled in the group chat—but he claimed Wednesday that it was all OK because the messages were sent to his personal cell phone, not his work one, which he claims he did not access until he returned to the states. Though classified information sent to a personal cellphone isn’t much more comforting, is it?

Representative Jimmy Gomez slammed Gabbard’s weak attempts to feign ignorance about the group chat’s sensitive content.

“Deciding to use military force is something hard to imagine. So, the ‘do not recall’ doesn’t pass the smell test,” the California Democrat said. “It makes it—it’s unbelievable that was the case. So that’s what the American people don’t understand.

“And I know a lot of folks in this administration were saying that they were gonna take on the establishment, and drain the swamp. But you have become that swamp in a matter of days—not weeks, not months: days!” Gomez said.

The teenage DOGE employee who went by the online username “Big Balls” used to run a company that provided tech support to a cybercrime group, according to Reuters.

In 2022, Edward Coristine ran a company called DiamondCDN that provided network services. One of its users was a group of cybercriminals known as EGodly, who openly bragged about stealing phone numbers and cryptocurrency, hacking law enforcement emails in South America and Eastern Europe, cyberstalking an FBI agent in Delaware, and trafficking other stolen data. The group, now retired, even thanked Coristine’s company for its support in 2023.

“We extend our gratitude to our valued partners DiamondCDN for generously providing us with their amazing DDoS protection and caching systems, which allow us to securely host and safeguard our website,” the group said. Coristine did not reply to Reuters’s request for comment.

It should be alarming that a teen who used to work with a cybercrime group now has wide access to the inner workings of the federal government and the personal information of millions of Americans.

Elon Musk, who has expressed support for Big Balls in the past, has yet to comment.

Trump supporters are desperately trying to downplay the war plans group chat scandal after complete messages of the discussion were released Wednesday.

On Monday, The Atlantic reported that top-ranking officials in Trump’s Cabinet, including Vice President JD Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, discussed American military plans on Signal, and accidentally added The Atlantic’s editor in chief to the chat. Two days later, after the Trump administration repeatedly insisted the information wasn’t classified, the magazine released the full text messages.

The messages contained details about the timing of an American airstrike and location of missile strikes against the Houthis in Yemen—information that MAGA says isn’t classified at all, but was merely being shared in a productive discussion among colleagues.

“Full Signal text chain has been released. There’s nothing in it but the pros and cons of striking now vs waiting a month. It’s not war plans. It’s not classified info,” Shawn Farash, a right-wing influencer known for his impressions of Trump, wrote on X. “It’s a conversation, and nice to see cabinet members and staffers hashing out the best way to move forward.”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt also denied that any “war plans” or “classified information” was sent in the group chat.

The Atlantic later dropped “war plans” from the article’s headline, which MAGA is taking as confirmation that the discussion of plans was just a conversation.

“The Atlantic has already abandoned their bullshit ‘war plans’ narrative, and in releasing the full chat , they concede they LIED to perpetuate yet ANOTHER hoax on the American people,” White House deputy chief of staff Taylor Budowich wrote on X. “What scumbags!”

But there was no lie. The full chat shows that Defense Secretary Hegseth sent texts detailing the attack’s timing, including “WHEN THE FIRST BOMBS WILL DEFINITELY DROP.”

“1410: More F-18s LAUNCH (2nd strike package),” he wrote. “1415: Strike Drones on Target (THIS IS WHEN THE FIRST BOMBS WILL DEFINITELY DROP, pending earlier ‘Trigger Based’ targets),” Hegseth wrote. “1536 F-18 2nd Strike Starts—also, first sea-based Tomahawks launched,” and “MORE TO FOLLOW (per timeline)”

If discussing the targets, timing and location of a U.S. airstrike is not classified information, or war plans … what is?

The head of the CIA undermined the president’s excuse to enact the Alien Enemies Act during a House Intelligence Committee hearing Wednesday.

“To invoke this law, the president must demonstrate that the United States is under invasion by a foreign nation or government,” Representative Joaquin Castro said. “They have alleged that we are under invasion by the Venezuelan government.”

“The idea that we are at war with Venezuela would come as a surprise to most Americans,” he continued. “You would think our nation being at war would merit at least a small reference in [a] threat assessment. Director Ratcliffe, does the intelligence community assess that we are currently at war or being invaded by the nation of Venezuela?”

“We have no assessment that says that,” CIA Director John Ratcliffe responded.

Earlier this month, the White House made a spontaneous decision to defy a court order by deporting more than 200 alleged members of a Venezuelan gang to El Salvador by invoking the Japanese internment-era wartime policy.

Five of the men sued the Trump administration in response, attempting to prevent their “imminent removal.” But even after U.S. District Judge James Boasberg ordered that the immigrants should remain in the U.S. as they await trial, Trump officials thwarted the law and sent them skybound regardless. Donald Trump justified the infraction by claiming Venezuelan immigration into the country constituted an “invasion,” and described the current era as a “time of war.” The men were taken to a notorious El Salvador prison known as CECOT.

The Trump administration pledged that every man it had deported to CECOT was a member of Tren de Aragua, a criminal organization, but family members and friends of the deportees claimed that’s not true. Some of the men that had been forced to board the planes had no criminal record.

On Tuesday, a U.S. circuit judge purported that the Trump administration’s actions were wildly unprecedented, and that the nation’s current use of the Alien Enemies Act was treating asylum-seekers worse than it treated actual German Nazis during World War II.

Donald Trump’s administration is desperately trying to spin the release of classified information by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth by pretending like there is any meaningful difference between “war plans” and “attack plans.”

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Taylor Budowich leapt on a new report from The Atlantic Wednesday, detailing sensitive information Hegseth sent in the now infamous group chat that Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg had previously omitted from his initial reporting on the high-level conversation to which he was accidentally privy. 

But Budowich wasn’t concerned about the obvious threat to national security—he was mad about The Atlantic’s headline: “Here Are the Attack Plans That Trump’s Advisers Shared on Signal.”

“The Atlantic has already abandoned their bullshit ‘war plans’ narrative, and in releasing the full chat, they concede they LIED to perpetuate yet ANOTHER hoax on the American people,” Budowich wrote on X Wednesday. “What scumbags!”

It seems that The Atlantic’s first headline had used the phrase “war plans” to describe the sensitive discussion about when bombs would drop on a foreign country, instead of “attack plans.” 

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt also attempted to make a mountain out of a molehill in a post on X. 

“The Atlantic has conceded: these were NOT ‘war plans.’ This entire story was another hoax written by a Trump-hater who is well-known for his sensationalist spin,” she said. 

Leavitt is in a bit of trouble now, because she had insisted that there had been no discussion of war plans and no classified information shared in the Signal group chat. The Atlantic’s reporting Wednesday confirmed that this was not true. According to the office of the director of national intelligence’s guidance on classification, “information providing indication or advance warning that the U.S. or its allies are preparing an attack,” is considered top secret. 

Hegseth inadvertently provided information on the strikes to a journalist a full two hours before the strikes took place because he—like the other members of the chat—was too sloppy to check the list of chat members before spouting off about the plans. 

The clear messaging pivot to focus on “war plans” versus “attack plans” suggests that the Trump administration can no longer back up its central, arguably more important, claim that no classified information was shared in the group chat. A claim that has since proven resoundingly false.

Trump’s National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, who was reportedly the administrator of the Signal chat and added Goldberg to the discussion, also posted on X Wednesday.

“No locations. No sources & methods. NO WAR PLANS,” he wrote. “Foreign partners had already been notified that strikes were imminent. BOTTOM LINE:  President Trump is protecting America and our interests.”

Trump officials made an obvious critical error when they accidentally added a journalist earlier this month to a Signal group chat discussing the specifics of an imminent attack on Houthi targets in Yemen. But they made another profound mistake by potentially inadvertently sharing the details of the battle plan with one of America’s longest adversaries.

The Trump administration’s Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff was in Russia when he was added to the chat on the retail app, a mistake that intelligence experts say basically hand-delivered news of the attack to the Kremlin hours before it took place.

“The Russians have whatever Witkoff was doing or saying on his personal cell phone,” former national security adviser Susan Rice told MeidasTouch Tuesday. “There should never have been a Signal chat used as the vehicle for a discussion involving anything sensitive regarding national security. The Russians undoubtedly have it.”

The Atlantic, whose editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg witnessed the chat unfold first-hand, released uncensored screenshots of the Signal exchange Wednesday morning after several top Trump officials disparaged the outlet, insisting that the attack details were not confidential.

Some of those details included down-to-the-minute scheduling for the launch of U.S. F-18 attack planes toward Yemen, “trigger based” strikes, and the launch of sea-based subsonic cruise missiles.

It also included some of America’s top officials reacting to news of the airstrikes with fire, fist, and American flag emojis.

The monumental slip-up was a horrific omen for U.S. national security, whose weakest link is apparently a crew of Cabinet members who can’t accomplish the basic due diligence of double-checking who they’re adding to a group chat hosted by a private company.

The Trump administration has offered conflicting excuses to sidestep The Atlantic’s report, including claiming that the chat never happened (despite a National Security Council spokesperson that confirmed its existence). The admin changed its tune Wednesday after the release of screenshots from the chat, with National Security Adviser Mike Waltz—who created the chat and added Greenberg—claiming that the story was false because it didn’t include weapons (it did), methods (again, it did), and what he described as “war plans.”

“BOTTOM LINE: President Trump is protecting America and our interests,” Waltz wrote.

The federal judge Trump currently hates the most (an ever-changing list) will now preside over the Signalgate lawsuit.

Judge James Boasberg has been making headlines after blocking the Trump administration’s invocation of the wartime 1798 Alien Enemies Act to carry out indiscriminate, extrajudicial deportations of people he claimed were Tren de Agua members to El Salvador.

The Trump administration ignored Boasberg’s order on the shoddy grounds that it was spoken aloud and not yet written, and the planes took off. When Boasberg ordered the planes to turn around, Salvadoran autocrat Nayib Bukele celebrated along with members of the Trump team. On March 15, Boasberg hit back, levying a restraining order against the Trump administration, blocking them from carrying out anymore deportations using the Alien Enemies Act’s wartime powers. Days later, Boasberg is still demanding more information on the deportations, and Trump continues to deny him.

Now, Boasberg will be at the bench to oversee the Trump administration’s most massive gaffe to date.

“You really can’t script this,” wrote Politico’s Kyle Cheney after Wednesday’s news that Boasberg will rule on the Signalgate lawsuit. “The same week the Trump admin invokes the state secrets privilege to deny Boasberg info, he is assigned the lawsuit over the Trump administration’s apparent carelessness with state secrets.”

Trump officials were sued Tuesday by the government watchdog American Oversight Tuesday after reports that The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg was added to a Signal group chat in which multiple cabinet members and Vice President JD Vance were discussing an attack on the Houthi rebels in Yemen. The administration has denied that anything classified was discussed and Trump himself blamed it on someone who worked at a “lower level.” Now, the judge he’s been battling with will be shedding even more light on the embarrassment.

Trump has yet to comment on Boasberg’s new post, but his Truth Social post from the midst of the Alien Enemies Act battle certainly give us some insight into how he may feel about this:

“This Radical Left Lunatic of a Judge, a troublemaker and agitator who was sadly appointed by Barack Hussein Obama, was not elected President - He didn’t WIN the popular VOTE (by a lot!), he didn’t WIN ALL SEVEN SWING STATES, he didn’t WIN 2,750 to 525 Counties, HE DIDN’T WIN ANYTHING!” Trump wrote of Boasberg on Truth Social on March 18. “This judge, like many of the Crooked Judges’ I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED!!! WE DON’T WANT VICIOUS, VIOLENT, AND DEMENTED CRIMINALS, MANY OF THEM DERANGED MURDERERS, IN OUR COUNTRY. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!”

Having to deal with Boasberg again will surely add more fuel to his hatred for what he thinks are “activist” judges.