The Trump administration drew a hard line this week: the 252 Venezuelan migrants deported to El Salvador's maximum-security prison last March are owed no additional due process, and the government will not comply with a federal judge's order to facilitate their legal hearings. Full stop.

In a filing Monday, the Justice Department told U.S. District Judge James Boasberg that every option he's floated — returning the migrants to American soil or holding proceedings abroad — is either legally impossible or practically unworkable. The administration isn't hedging. It's daring the courts to do something about it.

"If, over defendants' vehement legal and practical objections, the Court issues an injunction, defendants intend to immediately appeal, and will seek a stay pending appeal from this Court (and, if necessary, from the D.C. Circuit)."

According to Fox News, that's not the language of an administration looking for a compromise. It's a signal that this fight is heading exactly where it was always going to go — up.

Eleven Months and Counting

This legal battle has been grinding since last March, when the administration invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport 252 Venezuelan nationals to CECOT, a maximum-security facility in El Salvador. The deportations were carried out despite an emergency court order from Judge Boasberg — a fact that immediately escalated the dispute into a separation-of-powers clash that reached the Supreme Court by April.

The Supreme Court ruled then that individuals removed under the Alien Enemies Act must have a meaningful opportunity and notice to contest their removal before they are deported. Boasberg has spent the months since trying to determine what that looks like for people already on foreign soil. His December order gave the administration a choice: bring them back or set up hearings abroad that satisfy due process requirements.

The DOJ's Monday filing answered: neither.

National Security isn't A Suggestion

The administration's argument rests on something the legal class has spent a year trying to wish away — the real-world consequences of judicial overreach into foreign policy and national security.

DOJ lawyers argued that overseas proceedings would risk:

"injecting an extremely complicated issue into what is already a delicate situation"

and potentially:

"negatively affecting U.S. efforts toward stabilization and transition that aim to benefit tens of millions of Venezuelans."

This isn't abstract. The U.S. captured Nicolás Maduro in a raid in Caracas last month. His wife was arrested alongside him. The political situation in Venezuela is as fragile and volatile as it has been in years. The notion that a federal judge in Washington can order the executive branch to set up legal proceedings at the U.S. embassy in a country where the U.S. just seized the head of state — that's not due process. That's fantasy.

The DOJ also reiterated that returning the deportees to American soil would harm what it called "critical" foreign policy negotiations with Venezuela and carry "profound" national security risks, citing the alleged gang affiliations of the migrants in question.

The Alien Enemies Act Holds

Parallel to the Boasberg proceedings, the legal fight over the act itself played out last month before a 17-judge en banc panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. DOJ lawyers made the case that the 227-year-old statute is not some dusty relic being misapplied — it's a wartime authority designed for exactly this kind of threat.

The department pointed to the U.S. indictment against Maduro as proof of the underlying national security rationale:

"These new developments underscore the Maduro Regime's control over TdA and TdA's violent invasion or predatory incursion on American soil. As a result, it is even clearer that the President's invocation of the Alien Enemies Act was part of a high-level national security mission that exists outside the realm of judicial interference."

ACLU lawyer Lee Gelernt pushed back, telling the Fifth Circuit judges that the act doesn't hand the president unlimited authority:

"a blank check" for a president to "use his war powers any time he considers it valuable."

But the ACLU's framing misses the point. Nobody is claiming a blank check. The administration is claiming that a specific, documented, indicted criminal network — one run by a foreign regime the U.S. has now physically dismantled — constitutes the kind of enemy threat the Alien Enemies Act was written to address. The law is 227 years old because the problem is as old as the republic: foreign nationals operating as agents of hostile powers on American soil.

What Comes Next

A heated clash in court is expected next week. Boasberg will have to decide whether to issue the injunction the DOJ is preemptively promising to appeal. If he does, the case rockets to the D.C. Circuit and potentially back to the Supreme Court — which has already weighed in once and may have to do so again.

The broader question isn't really about 252 deportees. It's about whether the judiciary can functionally veto the executive's national security deportation powers by imposing procedural requirements that are impossible to satisfy after the fact. Boasberg's order essentially demands that the administration undo a completed enforcement action or reconstruct American courtroom standards in a destabilized foreign country. The DOJ responds that both options are absurd — and that the court has no authority to demand either one.

This is the defining legal confrontation of immigration enforcement in Trump's second term. The administration isn't retreating, isn't negotiating, and isn't pretending the courts have the last word on who gets to stay. The filing on Monday made that unmistakably clear.

The next move belongs to Judge Boasberg. The move after that belongs to the administration — and they've already told him exactly what it will be.