President Trump has invoked a wartime law called the Alien Enemies Act that allows the president to detain and deport citizens of an enemy nation without due process.

Now, the president used the law to deport some 200 Venezuelans who he says are part of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.

But as senior correspondent Brenda Flanagan explains, the deportation is in direct violation of a recent ruling from a district court judge who blocked the plans.

Brenda has more on that case as well as reaction from immigration advocates.

There's a lot of fear and anxieties right now.

New Jersey advocates watched horrified as soldiers offloaded 238 Venezuelans forcibly deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador by the Trump administration and justified some of it under America's Alien Enemies Act.

But critics call the move propaganda for a political agenda that's masquerading as immigration enforcement.

It's sending a partisan message, says Amy Torres with Jersey's Alliance for Immigrant Justice.

This implicit suggestion that, look how dangerous these people are, these are the measures that we have to take, where we have to shackle them, have them frog marched and we have to shave their heads.

We have 230 plus people who are basically disappeared and being held as political prisoners.

These were bad people.

That was a bad group of, as I say, "hombres" The president says 137 of these men belong to Tren de Aragua a dangerous criminal gang, and that he rightfully invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, even though Congress intended the law to be used as a safeguard only during wartime.

He said criminals.

Many, many criminals, murderers, drug dealers at the highest level, drug lords and people from mental institutions.

That's an invasion.

They invaded our country.

So this isn't in that sense.

This is war.

We're not at war.

There hasn't been any determination at all that these people who were removed or being detained under under the Alien Enemies Act are even members of Tren de Aragua.

Rutgers law professor Rose Cuison-Villazor notes these detainees included legitimate asylum seekers.

Some were arrested simply for their tattoos.

Moreover, the Trump administration also ignored a federal judge's order to return after the plane left for El Salvador.

Noting the court has all the facts it needs and the state secrets, privilege forecloses further demands for details.

Did they ignore the judge's order?

And if they did, you know, that's a constitutional crisis.

So it's clearly unprecedented.

There's no case law, there's no support for this kind of invocation of power.

The court functions as the ultimate backstop.

The ACLU says if the administration applies the enemy, aliens act without oversight.

It's being unlawfully used to target and accelerate the mass deportations that they've been planning.

And when it comes to due process, that means that they're sidestepping the laws that Congress set up that protect all of us from an unfair and unjust use of the.

There's a Jersey angle here.

When the Alien Enemies Act was invoked during World War Two, Italian, German and Japanese nationals were confined at Ellis Island.

After Pearl Harbor, immigration officials housed detainees in the Great Hall, including 134 Japanese who were living in New Jersey, according to researcher Anna Pegler Gordon.

They investigated them and rounded them up, and after a hearing at the Federal building, they then took those people who they believed to be a danger to Ellis Island, and they imprisoned them on Ellis Island.

But I want to point out that they gave them a hearing.

The government also housed some 50 Germans, mostly women, at an immigration station in Gloucester City and brought thousands of detained Japanese from internment camps out west to work at SEABROOK Farms in Cumberland County, says Rutgers Andy Urban.

Basically, they were held under this threat of federal imprisonment, and all of this was backdrop to their pending deportations.

And these individuals case eventually they won the right to remain in the U.S. and deportation orders were suspended essentially in June 1947.

Under U.S. law.

Those detainees got their day in court.

The one sent to El Salvador did not.

That's what's really troubling, because this is something that denies due process once the Alien Enemies Act is invoked.

And as we saw, even despite a judge's order, the plane didn't come back.

Right.

Court battles over the administration's actions continue.

I'm Brenda Flanagan, NJ.

Spotlight News.