Judge orders Trump to halt Alien Enemies Act deportations for Colorado detainees
A federal judge in Denver on Monday ordered President Donald Trump’s administration not to deport any detainees held in Colorado under the 1798 law it invoked last month to send hundreds of people to a brutal maximum-security prison in El Salvador.
U.S. District Court Judge Charlotte Sweeney’s order temporarily prohibits the removal of “all noncitizens in custody in the District of Colorado who were, are, or will be subject to” Trump’s March 14 order invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. Pursuant to that law, Trump’s order claims that the United States is under “invasion” by the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. It was the basis for the deportation last month of more than 200 Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador’s so-called Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, where the U.S. government is paying for them to be held.
About 90 percent of the deportees have no criminal record and only a handful had been charged with serious crimes, Bloomberg reported last week. At least one, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, was removed as a result of an “administrative error,” while advocates, attorneys and family members for many other deportees say that they were falsely identified as TdA members because of tattoos honoring family members or their favorite soccer team.
Sweeney’s order came after lawyers for two Venezuelan nationals held at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Aurora filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration on Saturday. Both of the men, who are identified only by their initials out of fear for their safety, have been falsely accused of TdA affiliation and face removal to CECOT under the Alien Enemies Act, their attorneys wrote.
The first plaintiff, known as D.B.U., is a 32-year-old asylum seeker who has lived in Colorado with his wife and two children. According to the filing, he was arrested during a January 26 raid by Drug Enforcement Administration agents on a makeshift nightclub in Adams County. The DEA’s Rocky Mountain field office described the event as a “Tren de Aragua party,” but subsequently acknowledged that many of those arrested were from countries other than Venezuela, including some European countries, and has refused to release the names of the people taken into custody, say how many of them are suspected TdA members or disclose other details of the operation.
The Colorado lawsuit, filed by attorneys with the American Civil Liberties Union, says that D.B.U. fears he will be deported under the Alien Enemies Act because of the DEA’s characterizations of the party, and because he has “a single tattoo of his niece’s name.”
The second plaintiff, R.M.M., not only denies being a member of TdA but says he fled Venezuela to seek asylum after the gang murdered two of his family members. He lived in Aurora with his wife and two children prior to his arrest on March 1. Nearly six weeks later, his attorneys wrote, a “heavily redacted” ICE filing accused him of TdA membership.
“R.M.M. is not and has never been a member of TdA, and in fact, lives in fear of the gang that has already killed two of his family members,” the lawsuit says. “R.M.M. has several tattoos for personal reasons, including one of his birth year, another of a family-member’s name, and a tattoo of religious significance, but they have nothing to do with TdA.”
The ACLU’s lawsuit in Colorado follows two similar challenges in Texas and New York, in the wake of a Supreme Court ruling last week that allowed deportations under the Alien Enemies Act to continue, but only if detainees are given due process and the opportunity to challenge their removal in court. Trump administration officials have subsequently said that detainees could be given 24 hours’ notice of their deportation, putting the plaintiffs and other Colorado detainees “at imminent risk of removal,” the lawsuit says.
“That suggestion not only defies the Supreme Court’s instructions but could mean that petitioners may fail to get meaningful notice or opportunity to seek judicial review before being sent permanently to a maximum security prison in El Salvador, where they could spend the rest of their lives,” ACLU attorneys wrote.
False and exaggerated TdA claims
Trump promised to invoke the Alien Enemies Act during a 2024 campaign stop in Aurora, a city he described as having been “invaded and conquered” by TdA. It was one of a series of false and exaggerated claims about the extent of the gang’s activity in Colorado made by Trump, his top immigration advisers and local far-right political figures in the heat of the 2024 presidential campaign.
Denver and Aurora police officials consistently characterized the gang’s presence as “isolated” and relatively small. The gang has been linked with criminal activity at several Aurora apartment complexes that were home to large numbers of Venezuelan migrants, some of whom sought to blame an absentee “slumlord” who had allowed the buildings to fall into squalor. Contrary to claims by far-right figures that crime has “skyrocketed” in Aurora since the new immigrants arrived, crime rates, consistent with national trends, have declined there and in Colorado as a whole since 2022.
At least two dozen alleged TdA members were arrested for various crimes by Denver-area police departments in 2024. Despite a high-profile attempt to crack down on the gang in recent months — part of a nationwide effort that Trump, during his visit last year, dubbed “Operation Aurora” — federal agents appear to have detained far fewer people with clear ties to the gang. No criminal charges resulted from the DEA’s January 26 raid, the agency later admitted. A subsequent operation led by ICE February 5 targeted “100+ members” of TdA in the Denver metro area, but agents told Fox News that out of 30 arrests made that day, only one detainee was suspected of TdA ties.
In addition to a petition for a writ of habeas corpus, D.B.U. and R.M.M.’s attorneys are seeking a temporary restraining order prohibiting their “summary removal.”
“Numerous accounts, both in declarations and public news reporting, have raised serious questions about the validity of the government’s designations of people as ‘alien enemies,’ with no process provided for anyone to contest those designations,” they wrote. “A TRO is needed because there may not be sufficient time for this court to intervene before people are put on planes to remove petitioners from the United States.”
Sweeney ordered the Trump administration to respond to the motion for a TRO by Thursday, and scheduled a hearing on the motion for April 21. In the meantime, she issued an order that “prohibits the removal from this jurisdiction” of the defendants and similar detainees.
