Deportation restrictions to Venezuela, and a political crisis after the first day of the Donald Trump campaign in the post-Biden Era
The agreement to resume the deportation flights to Venezuela also comes a day after the Trump administration said that it would end a Biden-era program that allowed hundreds of thousands of people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela to enter the United States lawfully and work for up to two years.
Saturday’s agreement could help Mr. Trump accelerate his plans for mass deportations, one of the central promises of his campaign. He has already enlisted military planes, sent people to third countries far from their homes and invoked the wartime law to achieve that goal. Arrests inside the country are up sharply relative to those in the Biden administration, but they are well below the levels Mr. Trump and his immigration advisers want.
The Trump administration refused to allow the judge to question them about the deportations. “The government is not being terribly cooperative at this point,” said the judge, James E. Boasberg, at a hearing on Friday. “But I will get to the bottom of whether they violated my order and who was responsible.”
The president and his friends called for the judge’s impeachment over his order that restricted deportations. The rapidly escalating spat caused Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. of the Supreme Court to weigh in with a rare statement, admonishing the calls for the judge’s impeachment. This spurred concerns of a constitutional crisis.
Mr. Trump said on Friday that he would put people in the prison complexes in El Salvador if they were caught vandalizing cars and could stay there 20 years.
Venezuela’s president has called for the return of the migrants sent to El Salvadoran, where they were transferred to a mega-prison.
“New, severe, and escalating sanctions” will be imposed on the country unless it starts accepting migrants again, Secretary of State Marco Rubio warned last week.