The Trump administration has invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport more than 200 Venezuelans to a massive prison in El Salvador without any due process. How has the president justified using a 227-year-old law that has only been wielded during actual wars to override the Constitution? He claims these men are members of the gang "Tren de Aragua."
As attorneys for the men fight to have them flown back to the United States, and as a federal judge tries to determine whether the Trump administration openly defied his order to turn back the airplanes that were used to whisk them away, it's worth examining New York City's role in boosting this xenophobic panic.
Specifically, the NYPD and Mayor Eric Adams, who spent much of 2024 pushing a narrative that New York, which is home to thousands of recently-arrived Venezuelan migrants, is somehow being inundated with members of a small, relatively new regional gang that is named for the Tocorón prison in the Venezuelan state of Aragua.