President Donald Trump‘s administration transferred more than 200 migrants to the custody of El Salvador early Sunday in a chilling video posted online just hours after a judge temporarily blocked the deportations.
A judge ruled hours earlier on Saturday that Trump’s invocation of an 18th century wartime law—one that had been used only three times in the nation’s history—to order deportations would require further hearing.
Lawyers for the government, multiple outlets reported, informed him that there was already one plane to El Salvador and one plane to Honduras shuttling migrants out of the United States in the air.
U.S. District Judge James Boasberg ordered those planes be turned around, though only did so verbally and did not include the specific request in his written order.
Either way, his decree went unheeded: in the early hours of Sunday morning, Salvadorian President Nayib Bukele, a cryptocurrency-loving Trump ally who agreed to house 300 migrants in his country’s prisons for $6 million for one year, confirmed that 238 men had been received by local authorities.
Video set to dramatic music and posted by Bukele Sunday morning shows men being removed from an airplane by armed personnel and frog-marched to buses before they are driven to a detention facility.
Once at the facility, they are shown wearing prison uniforms, having their heads and facial hair shaved, and being placed in holding cells.
In a social media post, Bukele, who said the video showed the arrival of 238 Tren de Aragua members in El Salvador, appeared to mock the Boasberg’s attempt to halt the transfer, writing: “Oopsie…Too late 😂”.
Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, excitedly shared Bukele’s post.
Attorney General Pam Bondi, in a statement released Saturday after the judge’s decision, claimed Boasberg’s ruling “disregards well-established authority regarding President Trump’s power, and it puts the public and law enforcement at risk.”
Trump advisor Elon Musk called for the judge to be impeached, in posts on his social media platform X. Musk has previously called for judges who ruled against the administration to be booted from the benches.
The migrants were deported after Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which requires the president to declare the nation is at war and was previously used in the War of 1812 and during the two world wars of the 20th century.
In a statement released little more than an hour before Boasberg’s ruling, Trump essentially claimed the transnational Venezuelan criminal syndicate Tren de Aragua was at war with the US.
He called the group “a hybrid criminal state that is perpetrating an invasion of and predatory incursion into the United States, and which poses a substantial danger to the United States.”
The American Civil Liberties Union, which filed the lawsuit that resulted in Boasberg’s temporary restraining order, said it has asked for clarification about whether the Trump administration defied a court order in carrying out the deportations to El Salvador.
The ACLU filed the lawsuit on behalf of five Venezuelans in Texas who said they are concerned they could be wrongly accused of being Tren de Aragua members and deported—potentially to a Salvadorian maximum security prison—if Trump was allowed to invoke the Alien Enemies Act.
In a statement posted to social media Sunday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio boasted that the administration had deported “over 250 alien enemy members of Tren de Aragua which El Salvador has agreed to hold in their very good jails at a fair price that will also save our taxpayer dollars.”
The ACLU argued during Saturday’s hearing that Trump was not authorized to use the Alien Enemies Act against a criminal organization that was not a recognized state.
Boasberg gave his order to pause the deportations because, he said, the civil rights organization had a reasonable chance of success on the merits of that argument.
