HuffPost reports:

The Trump administration is building a case in court for its ability to send people in the United States to an overseas detention camp — and then refuse to bring them home even if they’re innocent.

In a new court filing Tuesday night, the administration referred to a group of Venezuelan migrants and asylum seekers it moved from the U.S. to an infamous Salvadoran prison — a gay makeup artist and a professional soccer player reportedly among them — as not only enemy combatants but also terrorists, supposedly subject to presidential powers that U.S. judges cannot review at all once they are outside of the country.

“The President doubtlessly acts within his constitutional prerogative by declining to transport foreign terrorists into the country,” administration lawyers wrote, explaining why they assert they did not violate a judge’s order to turn around planes carrying the migrants in question and bring them back to the United States.

“The President’s ultimate direction of the flights at issue here—especially once they had departed from U.S. airspace—implicated military matters, national security, and foreign affairs outside of our Nation’s borders,” government lawyers added later. “As such, it was beyond the courts’ authority to adjudicate.”

Once the planes were outside of the United States, the government argued, “the Constitution itself provided sufficient authority to act, and any dispute over the President’s extraterritorial exercise of that authority would present a non-reviewable political question.”

To some legal observers, it was a shocking assertion of presidential power.

“This argument suggests the existence of some kind of foreign policy loophole whereby the Executive could disregard the law to bring anyone accused of a national security threat outside of US territory, at which point he, as President, could do whatever he wants to them on national security ground,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, calling the government’s argument “a WILD claim.”

The Venezuelan migrants sent to El Salvador’s brutal supermax prison known as CECOT were claimed by Donald Trump’s administration to be members of a gang called Tren de Aragua — despite ample evidence, in some cases, to the contrary.

For example, at least one man had already successfully passed the extensive refugee screening process, only to be deemed a gang member by an immigration agent at an airport due to his tattoos, The Miami Herald reported. Several others were exercising their legal right to pursue asylum in the United States. [Continue reading…]