ORLANDO, Fla. — In a historic move, President Donald Trump evoked a wartime law to speed up the deportation of some undocumented immigrants. “I can tell you this - these were bad people. That was a bad group of people – as I say – hombres,” said the president over the weekend.
The president used the initiative to send more than 250 immigrants who are allegedly members of a Venezuelan gang to a prison in El Salvador.
The Alien Enemies Act was last used during World War II and, at the time, resulted in more than 100,000 thousand incarcerations of Japanese Americans. “The Alien Enemies Act was created to bypass the standard due process in immigration when the country is under war or under invasion,” said Walter Santos, an immigration attorney based in Orlando.
“So we have people that should not be inside our territory, and we can expel, we can send them away without being heard by a judge.”
Now, a federal judge put President Trump’s order on hold, but the flight still took off, and the immigrants were deported. The Trump administration claims all those arrested belong to a Venezuelan gang called Tren de Aragua.
“Absolutely, yes, they should be deported, but after paying for the crime in the United States,” said William Diaz, founder of Casa de Venezuelan, a nonprofit dedicated to advocating for Venezuelan nationals who live in Central Florida.
Although immigration organizations like Casa de Venezuela agree that people who commit crimes should face the consequences, they fear the president’s actions could lead to unlawful deportations.
“I need to have right now this [passport] in my pocket because if somebody finds me talking Spanish on the road, I want to make sure that they don’t catch me and create me a crime, assign me a crime,” said Diaz, holding up his passport.
Casa de Venezuela is meeting with other Venezuelan organizations from all over the U.S. to come up with a plan to fight the president’s move.
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