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Tren de Aragua is a notorious gang. Its members traffic in people and drugs. They torture and kill with impunity in countries where they operate. They are despicable and dangerous criminals.
But they're not what the White House makes them out to be: an invading military force. An invading military force looks like the Russian army, invading Ukraine. Or Allied soldiers, storming the beaches of Normandy.
Of course, the White House crew doesn't actually believe we face a military tanks-and-commandos invasion. When they use the word "invasion," they mean something different: People who look nothing like an organized army, or even a rag-tag militia, bent on some military objective. They're a mix of individuals. Some are legitimate asylum seekers fleeing persecution; some are people simply seeking better jobs; and yes, some may be dangerous criminals.
The dangerous criminals should be deported; that's a no-brainer. And that's regular old law enforcement, not warfare. But rather than sort through these people, to do the hard, slow work of separating the vicious from the well-meaning, the Trump administration is whipping up an emergency to justify acting in bad faith. The president has effectively closed paths to asylum and terrified would-be migrants by sending immigrants to a Salvadoran prison known for its cruelty, and without so much as a charge, trial or sentence.
It took a federal judge from Texas -- a Trump appointee, in fact -- to call the administration on its absurd and blatantly unconstitutional misuse of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.
U.S. District Judge Fernando Rodriguez, Jr., a 2018 Trump appointee, issued a permanent injunction last week against the administration's use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelan migrants to a prison in El Salvador without any semblance of due process -- a right guaranteed by the Constitution. The judge wrote that Trump's reliance on the act "exceeds the scope of the statute and is contrary to the plain, ordinary meaning of the statute's terms."
Doing his own research, Rodriguez found that the words of the Alien Enemies Act in their original sense referred to armed forces. "(Trump's proclamation) makes no reference to and in no manner suggests that a threat exists of an organized, armed group of individuals entering the United States at the direction of Venezuela to conquer the country or assume control over a portion of the nation," he wrote in a 36-page ruling.
"Plain, ordinary meaning." The judge's words could have tripped off the tongues of Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.
Rodriguez is merely the latest of numerous federal judges attempting to remind the president that the rule of law still prevails, however threatened it might be.
The Venezuelan migrants the administration accused of "invading" the U.S. remain confined to a detention center near the Rio Grande Valley town of Raymondville. They may or may not even be gang members. Rodriguez, adhering to the law, did not say they have to be released immediately. He did not say they couldn't, at some point, be deported. But he did side with the migrants on something fundamentally American: their constitutional right to "due process."
"Due process." Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment shorthand for justice, equality and fairness under the law, the phrase is fast becoming a mantra during these early months of Trump's second term because of his willingness to circumvent laws and procedures. Whether it's his effort to peremptorily end birthright citizenship or fire government employees without cause or cyclone through federal agencies, leaving wreckage and hardship in his wake, he's likely violating the law and then daring judges to stop him. More and more are taking the dare on behalf of the American people.
Using our voices and our votes, working in alliance with honorable jurists like Fernando Rodriguez, Jr., we're in a fight for the future of our constitutional republic.
-- Houston Chronicle