It turns out that Donald Trump is a duly elected president and has all the necessary authority to enforce laws that Congress has enacted. The Supreme Court says so. In a surprise ruling Monday night, the high court ruled 5-4 that President Trump is allowed to invoke one of our nation’s oldest laws to protect the country. The president is now authorized to use the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to speed up deportations of illegal alien terrorists from Venezuela and other countries.
Trump first invoked the Alien Enemies Act in March 2025. This was after the violent Venezuelan cartel group, Tren de Aragua, had been designated as a foreign terrorist group. There was an orderly and perfectly legal process to this. First came the terrorist designation, then came the Alien Enemies Act.
The Trump administration then rounded up more than 100 Venezuelans and shipped them to El Salvador, where President Bukele locked them in a maximum security prison. This was the incident in which Judge James Boasberg tried to order the military plane around in mid-air to bring the terrorists back.
The first planeload of deportations happened in about 24 hours. The Venezuelan terrorists, including media darling and human trafficker “Maryland Man,” were arrested, loaded on a plane, and shipped out.
Immigration attorneys for these “Maryland Men” sued. In May, the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that the administration had failed to provide sufficient notice and due process before carrying out the deportations. That led to a temporary pause in deportations under the Alien Enemies Act, while the case worked its way through the Fifth Circuit.
No previous court ever had a problem with a duly elected president invoking the Alien Enemies Act to deport dangerous foreign nationals. For 227 years, it was the law of the land in America. It was only when the Bad Orange Man tried to invoke the Alien Enemies Act that the courts suddenly found a constitutional problem with it.
During the War of 1812, President James Madison invoked the law to deport British nationals. We don’t have accurate numbers because of sparse recordkeeping back then, but it’s like that dozens of Brits were deported. No court intervened on their behalf.
During World War I, President Woodrow Wilson had 6,300 German, Italian, and Ottoman (Turkish) nationals arrested and thrown in internment camps. Most were eventually deported. No court intervened on their behalf.
During World War II, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt used the Alien Enemies Act to arrest and deport 11,000 Japanese, German, and Italian nationals. He also expanded his own authority to lock 120,000 Japanese Americans up in internment camps until the end of the war. No court ever intervened or sought to put a check on presidential authority.
But when President Trump uses the Alien Enemies Act to deport child sex traffickers and fentanyl dealers, there’s suddenly a big constitutional crisis over the due process of illegal aliens. Go figure. (Roosevelt, Wilson, and Madison were all Democrats, by the way.)
On Monday night, the Supreme Court handed down a new ruling, authorizing the Trump administration to resume deportations of Venezuelan terrorists under the Alien Enemies Act. It came down a procedural difference. The court ruled that instead of class actions involving hordes of foreign invaders, each individual illegal alien is required to contest their deportation on their own.
This is fantastic news! It will speed up the deportation process even further. If Venezuelan terrorists want to contest their deportations in court, they’ll have to do it from El Salvador or Liberia or wherever Stephen Miller ships them off to.
It was a boys-against-girls Supreme Court ruling, with the men ruling in favor of President Trump, and Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Amy Coney Barrett, and Elena Kagan voting against him. Which proves my longstanding theory that the Founding Fathers never intended for women to serve on the Supreme Court.
In Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s dissent, she argued that the administration was engaging in “gamesmanship” by rushing deportations before legal challenges could be filed. As if every illegal alien is somehow entitled to a trial and a years-long court process before they get the boot.
It was a close decision because Barrett once again stabbed President Trump in the back. But a win is a win. Joe Biden let at least 20 million invaders into our country with no due process. Trump has to be able to deport them just as rapidly.