Trump spokesperson denies deportations were illegal and says White House ‘confident’ it will win in court – live

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt gave the Trump administration’s version of events of the controversial deportation of undocumented immigrants suspected of belonging to a Venezuelan gang, describing it as “a counter-terrorism operation”.

The deportation appeared to fly in the face of a federal judge’s order that the migrants not be removed from the United States while he considered the legality invoking the Alien Enemies Act to swiftly deport them.

“President Trump signed a proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act regarding the invasion of the United States by the foreign terrorist organization, Tren de Aragua,” Leavitt said at a press briefing. “At the president’s direction, the Department of Homeland Security carried out a counter-terrorism operation deporting nearly 200 violent Tren de Aragua terrorists, which will save countless American lives.”

In response to a question on why deportation planes were not turned around despite a judge’s orders to do so, Donald Trump’s border czar Tom Homan told reporters on Monday:

“The plane was already over international waters with a plane full of terrorists and significant public safety threats … The president did exactly the right thing.”

Homan went on to add:

“We removed terrorists. That should be a celebration in this country.”

Democratic senators including Alex Padilla, Dick Durbin, Peter Welch and Cory Booker have released a statement on Donald Trump invoking the Alien Enemies Act, which they argue is targeting immigrants without due process.

Together, the senators said:

“Let’s be clear: we are not at war, and immigrants are not invading our country. Furthermore, courts determine whether people have broken the law – not a president acting alone, and not immigration agents picking and choosing who gets imprisoned or deported.”

Small-town USA is facing a “significant risk” that the Trump administration is going to abandon key elements of a $42.45bn Biden-era plan to connect rural communities to high-speed internet so that Elon Musk can get even richer, a top departing commerce department official warned in an email.

Evan Feinman, who headed up the so-called Bead program for the last three years, urged governors across the country to lobby their congressional delations in Washington to stop the Trump administration from implementing plans he said could have “deeply negative outcomes” for American homes and businesses.

“Stranding all or part of rural America with worse internet so that we can make the world’s richest man even richer is yet another in a long line of betrayals by Washington,” Feinman said.

A copy of the email, which was first reported by Politico, was seen by the Guardian.

For the full story, click here:

The Trump administration sent 250 people, who were mainly Venezuelan and alleged to be gang members, to El Salvador, where the government has opened its prisons to deportees from the United States.

Human Rights Watch warns that conditions in the prisons are dangerous and inhumane:

Detainees in El Salvador’s prison system are cut off from the outside world and denied any meaningful legal recourse. While [president Nayib] Bukele publicizes his prisons as “the best in the world,” the reality is very different. We have interviewed people released from these prisons and dozens who have relatives in jail. One after the other, we received and verified accounts of dismal detention conditions, torture and death.

One of the people we spoke with was an 18-year-old construction worker who said that police beat prison newcomers with batons for an hour. He said that when he denied being a gang member, they sent him to a dark basement cell with 320 detainees, where prison guards and other detainees beat him every day. One guard beat him so severely once, he said, that it broke a rib.

He said the cell was so crowded that detainees had to sleep on the floor or standing, an allegation we hear frequently, in a prison system where 108,000 detainees—1.7 percent of El Salvador’s population—are crammed into spaces meant for 70,000. The U.S. State Department itself has described these conditions as “life-threatening.”

Like many others, the former detainee said that prisons were filthy and disease-ridden. While the Salvadoran government has denied Human Rights Watch access to their prisons, doctors who visited detention sites told us that tuberculosis, fungal infections, scabies, severe malnutrition and chronic digestive issues were common.

El Salvador’s criminal justice system has a history of jailing US deportees, which has made their gang violence problem worse:

Sending people into such conditions would not only make the U.S. government complicit in violations of human rights, it would also repeat past mistakes. MS13 and Barrio 18, the brutal gangs that until recently terrorized neighborhoods across El Salvador, were born in part from deportations by the U.S. and from El Salvador’s harsh law enforcement practices. Deportations from the U.S. in the 1990s, during the Clinton administration, allowed these gangs to expand.

Mass arrests in the 2000s, which the Salvadoran government characterized as a way to curb the gangs, instead gave gang leaders the time and proximity to strengthen their internal structures in prison and a dehumanized population to recruit from. More U.S. deportations to El Salvador during the 2000s built upon this rotten foundation. Salvadoran authorities often assumed that people deported from the U.S. were members of criminal organizations and subjected many to arrests, torture, beatings, sexual assault, disappearances and killings.

After ordering a wave of military strikes against leaders of the Houthis in Yemen over the weekend, Donald Trump says he will in the future retaliate against Iran for any further attacks by the group.

Iran has long supported the Houthis, who have stepped up attacks on commercial vessels off Yemen’s waters in retaliation for Israel’s invasion of Gaza. Here’s what the president wrote on Truth Social:

Let nobody be fooled! The hundreds of attacks being made by Houthi, the sinister mobsters and thugs based in Yemen, who are hated by the Yemeni people, all emanate from, and are created by, IRAN. Any further attack or retaliation by the “Houthis” will be met with great force, and there is no guarantee that that force will stop there. Iran has played “the innocent victim” of rogue terrorists from which they’ve lost control, but they haven’t lost control. They’re dictating every move, giving them the weapons, supplying them with money and highly sophisticated Military equipment, and even, so-called, “Intelligence.” Every shot fired by the Houthis will be looked upon, from this point forward, as being a shot fired from the weapons and leadership of IRAN, and IRAN will be held responsible, and suffer the consequences, and those consequences will be dire!

Rallies in Yemen following the US attacks have brought tens of thousands of people out on to the streets. We have a live blog covering the reaction, and you can read it here:

Federal judge James Boasberg has scheduled a 5pm hearing for the Trump administration to explain if they defied his order not to deport undocumented immigrants suspected of belonging to a Venezuelan gang.

Planes carrying the migrants arrived in El Salvador after Boasberg’s order, and attorneys for some of those deported have argued that it appears the administration willingly defied his instruction that they turn back or refrain from departing the United States. Top administration officials said they disagreed with Boasberg’s order, with some reportedly arguing that it did not apply to the aircraft because they were in international airspace when it was handed down.

Russian asylum seekers were once allowed to remain temporarily in the United States while their case was being considered. That’s no longer the case, the Guardian’s Sofia Sorochinskaia reports:

For most of the four years of Joe Biden was in office, citizens of Russia and other post-Soviet states seeking asylum in the US were generally released into the country while they awaited hearings on their claim in immigration court.

But since last summer, many have been detained upon entering the US, and some of them have been held for more than a year, lawyers, activists and detainees say. Some children have been separated from their parents.

“My Russian clients tell me, ‘Now our prison is 80% Russian, the remaining 20% are from rotating nationalities who stay for a while,’” said immigration attorney Julia Nikolaev, who has been advocating for detainees’ rights alongside representatives of the Russian opposition. “Only Russians and a few other post-Soviet nationals remain in detention until their final hearings.”

Alexei Demin, a 62-year-old former naval officer from Moscow, was detained in July of last year.

In the last 20 years, Demin rarely missed an anti-Vladimir Putin protest in the Russian capital. He had become concerned almost immediately after Putin, a former KGB agent, rose to power, he said. For years, he criticized Putin’s regime on Facebook, and he was detained twice at protests. Still, he never imagined that he would end up fleeing his homeland for fear that Putin’s regime would imprison him. Or that he would end up imprisoned in the US.

Politico has more details about Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) rationale for deporting Rasha Alawieh, a doctor and kidney specialist who was sent to Lebanon despite having a valid US visa.

CBP agents at Boston Logan international airport say Alawieh was found with images of Hezbollah leaders, and acknowledged attending the funeral of Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike. Alawieh’s case raised concern because it appeared she was deported in violation of a court order that required a judge be given notice before she was removed from the country.

Here’s more:

Federal authorities say they deported a Lebanese doctor holding an American visa last week after finding “sympathetic photos and videos” of prominent Hezbollah figures in the deleted items folder of her cell phone.

Rasha Alawieh, a physician specializing in kidney transplants and professor at Brown University, also told Customs and Border Protection agents that while visiting Lebanon last month she attended the funeral of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and supported him “from a religious perspective” but not a political one.

“CBP questioned Dr. Alawieh and determined that her true intentions in the United States could not be determined,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Sady wrote in a filing to the court.

The claims in court filings submitted Monday by Justice Department lawyers are the first public explanation of why Alawieh, 34, was deported Friday despite holding a U.S. visa typically issued to foreigners with special skills for a job that an employer claims difficulty finding American candidates to fill.

The assertions about Alawieh’s affinity for Hezbollah came shortly before a federal judge was scheduled to hold a hearing Monday on whether the government defied an order he issued Friday requiring that she not be deported without advance notice to the court. U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin postponed the hearing Monday morning just before it was to begin. He gave the government another week to submit further information about what happened with Alawieh.

CBP would never intentionally defy a court order, the government said.

CBP official John Wallace said in a sworn declaration filed with the court that CBP officials at Boston’s Logan Airport hadn’t received formal notification of the court order through official channels before Alawieh was put on an Air France flight bound for Paris Friday night.

Democracy Forward and the American Civil Liberties Union, who are representing a group of Venezuelans that Donald Trump ordered deported under the Alien Enemies Act, told a federal judge they fear that the government violated his order to keep the migrants in the country while he weighs their case.

In a motion filed today, the two rights groups point to evidence that the government allowed planes carrying alleged gang members, most of whom are from Venezuela, to depart for or continue flying to Central American countries even after federal judge James Boasberg said they should turn back.

“Plaintiffs remain extremely concerned that, regardless of which time is used, the government may have violated the Court’s command,” attorneys for the two groups wrote. They continued:

The government states that “some gang members subject to removal under the Proclamation had already been removed from United States territory under the Proclamation before the issuance of this Court’s second order … That phrasing strongly suggests that the government has chosen to treat this Court’s Order as applying only to individuals still on U.S. soil or on flights that had yet to clear U.S. airspace as of 7:26pm (the time of the written order). If that is how the government proceeded, it was a blatant violation of the Court’s Order.

Boasberg is expected to this morning further consider the case in Washington DC federal court.

A major legal showdown is brewing over Donald Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport alleged gang members, most of whom are from Venezuela. The law, among the oldest in the United States, has not been used since the second world war, but Trump has argued it is necessary and likened stopping the flow of undocumented immigrants to fighting a war. Here’s more about the act, from the Associated Press:

Donald Trump on Saturday invoked the Alien Enemies Act for the first time since the second world war, granting himself sweeping powers under a centuries-old law to deport people associated with a Venezuelan gang. Hours later, a federal judge halted deportations under the US president’s order.

The act is a sweeping wartime authority that allows noncitizens to be deported without being given the opportunity to go before an immigration or federal court judge.

Trump’s proclamation on Saturday identified Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua gang as an invading force. US district judge James Boasberg blocked anyone from being deported under the proclamation for two weeks and scheduled a Friday hearing to consider arguments.