'Sweeping wartime authority': Judge calls emergency meeting over another mass deportation

U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, the same judge who has threatened to hold Trump administration officials in criminal contempt of court for ignoring judicial orders on how to handle mass migrant deportations, called an emergency meeting on Friday evening over another potential round of removals, CNN's Priscilla Alvarez reported.

"There is a group of Venezuelan migrants at a detention facility in Texas who are concerned that they are going to be deported under the sweeping wartime authority known as the Alien Enemies Act," Alvarez told anchor Jake Tapper. "Now, there have been court rulings across the country to block some people from being removed under this authority. This particular district in Texas, the Northern District, is not — is not the case."

"I have been talking to lawyers there who represent some of these clients who were told by ICE that they were going to be subject to this authority and imminently removed," said Alvarez. "That is why there is an emergency hearing happening in 15 minutes to talk about this. Because the key part of this, Jake, is did they get due process? Did the administration give them enough time to tell them that they were going to be subject to this wartime authority?"

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Additionally, she noted, "they're actually also going to the Supreme Court. They are now asking the Supreme Court to also weigh in on this, saying the lawyers wrote to the Supreme Court, quote, 'The government's actions to date, including its lightning-fast timeline, do not give members of the proposed class a realistic opportunity to contest the removal under the AEA' ... if you recall, the Supreme Court said the administration could use this, but they also said that they need to give them some level of due process."

The complication, she noted, is that the Supreme Court wasn't specific on what "due process" would look like in this situation.

"They just said reasonable time to contest it. Well, the question is, what exactly does 'reasonable time' mean? Because, according to what I'm being told by lawyers, this is about a 24-hour, 12-hour turnaround."

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