A legal fight born from the ashes of a centuries-old statute has been reignited in Manhattan. Two Venezuelan men, detained in Goshen, New York, have stepped into the center of a high-stakes constitutional brawl after the U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way for the government to fast-track deportations under the long-dormant Alien Enemies Act—a law dating back to 1798.
The men, identified only as G.F.F. and J.G.O., are asking a federal judge to slam the brakes on their removal from U.S. soil. Their petition, filed Tuesday, urges U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein to bar the Trump administration from whisking them out of his jurisdiction or invoking the 18th-century wartime law to justify deporting them before their full case can even be heard.
A hearing is set for Wednesday morning, where the court will weigh not just the fate of these two men—but potentially thousands of other Venezuelan nationals now caught in the dragnet of this revived law. The American Civil Liberties Union, leading the legal charge, hopes to have the case certified as a class action, aiming to protect a broader group from what they argue are unjust removals.
This new lawsuit comes just 24 hours after the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision divided along ideological lines, lifted a freeze that had halted Trump’s order to deport alleged members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. The high court sided with the administration—but added a caveat: deportees must be notified and allowed to challenge their removal. That’s a right, the two plaintiffs argue, they never got.
Their complaint says the government has not proven they are members of Tren de Aragua—a group recently labeled by U.S. officials as a foreign terrorist organization. “There remains an unacceptably high risk that the government will deport class members who are not in fact members of TdA,” the ACLU wrote bluntly in court filings.
The case hinges on Trump’s decision last month to dust off the Alien Enemies Act, a law most remembered for its dark use during World War II to intern Japanese, German, and Italian immigrants. On March 15, Trump ordered alleged gang members deported without the normal process of immigration court hearings. That same day, a judge in Washington, D.C., temporarily blocked the move, saying the president’s powers under the law likely didn’t extend that far.
But by then, two deportation flights had already taken off. Hundreds of Venezuelans were transferred to El Salvador and jailed—raising new legal questions about whether those individuals, already removed, can still seek review in U.S. courts.
The Supreme Court didn’t touch that part of the mess. Instead, it focused on jurisdiction, saying detainees should have filed their claims in Texas, not Washington. But the two plaintiffs had already been moved to New York by April 4—adding a twist to the legal geography of the case.
Meanwhile, a separate court is still weighing whether the Trump administration defied the earlier court order by failing to return the two flights. Officials insist they acted in compliance.
And the administration isn’t backing down. On Tuesday, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi took to social media with a firm message: “We will continue to deport violent terrorists.”
With hearings beginning in New York and legal threads unraveling across multiple states, the revived Alien Enemies Act—once a relic of wartime paranoia—is now back on center stage, pulling modern-day immigration policy into its ancient grip.
