Denver judge blocks Trump deportations of accused Venezuelan gang members to prison in El Salvador

The Trump administration cannot deport Venezuelans held in an Aurora immigration detention center to a prison in El Salvador without giving them adequate notice and a chance to fight in court, a Denver federal judge ruled Tuesday. 

The ruling from U.S. District Judge Charlotte N. Sweeney came after ACLU Colorado and an immigrant rights group argued that two men from Venezuela were at risk of getting sent on a plane to an infamously dangerous Salvadorian prison. 

The ruling applies not just to the two men, but to all Venezuelans held at the detention center who face near-immediate deportation under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act. The act invoked by President Donald Trump gives the government broad authority to deport people in times of war or invasion. 

The Denver court is among a few others across the country to take up the issue as federal immigration officials have bused immigrants from detention centers to airports, then loaded them onto planes bound for the Terrorism Confinement Center, a megaprison accused of using electric shock and waterboarding to torture prisoners. The prison already holds about 300 deportees accused by the U.S. government of being members of the dangerous Venezuelan street gang, Tren de Aragua.

Deportees were given little notice, no time to consult a lawyer and no chance to try to prove they are not gang members — rights of due process normally afforded to immigrants facing deportation, civil rights attorneys have argued. In many cases, evidence of involvement in Tren de Aragua has been based on detainees’ tattoos.

Attorneys for the government argued in Denver that blocking deportations would “irreparably harm the United States’ conduct of foreign policy” and “usurp” Trump’s authority to address “what he has identified as an invasion.” 

When Trump issued a proclamation in March invoking the Alien Enemies Act, he said that Tren de Aragua is a “hybrid criminal state” that “is perpetrating, attempting, and threatening an invasion or predatory incursion against the territory of the United States.” The gang “commits brutal crimes” including murder and kidnapping and is “conducting irregular warfare and undertaking hostile actions against the United States,” the proclamation said. 

The ruling in Denver follows an emergency U.S. Supreme Court decision early Saturday that said the Trump administration could not deport alleged Venezuelan gang members detained in Texas. Buses taking men from a Texas detention center to the airport over the weekend were forced by the ruling to turn around. 

“That is the only thing that stopped those human beings from being disappeared to the CECOT prison in El Salvador,” ACLU Colorado legal director Tim Macdonald argued Monday in federal court in Denver.

The judge’s order says federal officials cannot take the men out of Colorado, which would prevent immigration officials from transferring them to a detention center in another state and then deporting them from there. It also says authorities must provide at least 21 days’ notice to detainees — written in a language they understand — that they face deportation and that they have a right to seek judicial review of their case. 

She said deportation notices provided to detainees have been “deficient” and did not “comport with due process.” Sweeney also wrote that without the restraining order, accused gang members “face the risk of being deported—perhaps wrongfully deported” under the Alien Enemies Act “in violation of their constitutional rights.”

The temporary restraining order is in place until May 6 but the judge could extend it. 

The case was filed on behalf of two unnamed Venezuelan men, identified as D.B.U. and R.M.M., held in detention in Aurora. They are represented by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network.

D.B.U., is 32 and fled Venezuela after he was “persecuted and imprisoned for his political activity,” according to his lawyers. He was arrested during a raid by federal agents at a makeshift nightclub during what the agents termed a Tren de Aragua party. The man has a tattoo — not associated with a gang but of his niece’s name — and is not a gang member, his lawyers said. 

R.M.M. is 25 and left Venezuela after two family members were killed by Tren de Aragua, according to court records. Immigration officials called him a “known member” of Tren de Aragua, but R.M.M. denies that. His tattoos are of his mother’s name, his birth year, a pattern, a religious symbol and a character from the board game Monopoly, according to court records. 

The defendants in the case include President Trump, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, director of the Denver ICE field office Robert Guadian and the warden of the ICE detention center in Aurora, Dawn Ceja. 

The judge had issued a temporary restraining order last week preventing the deportation of the two men in the lawsuit, pending her decision after this week’s hearing.