Legal fight raging over possible imminent deportations to El Salvador

The Trump administration appeared on Friday to be preparing to send a new group of Venezuelan men from the U.S. to El Salvador's notorious CECOT prison.

The Department of Homeland Security appeared Friday to be preparing to send a new group of Venezuelan men from the U.S. to El Salvador and its notorious CECOT prison, even as lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union scrambled in the courts to stop the administration from moving forward.

On Friday afternoon, at least one charter bus rolled up to the Bluebonnet Detention Center in Anson, Texas, a town about 200 miles west of Dallas, where the men are being held. U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, who has been hearing a case related to the flights to El Salvador, scheduled an emergency hearing for Friday evening, to take place just hours after that bus arrived.

Not long before the emergency hearing was scheduled to begin, ACLU attorneys also asked the Supreme Court to step in. The justices ruled earlier this month that the Trump administration can go ahead with removals like this, but that the people being removed must first be given “reasonable time” to challenge their detentions.

At the emergency hearing Friday evening, a lawyer for the government told Boasberg that his understanding was no flights involving the men were going to take place Friday night, and that none were scheduled for Saturday, but that the Department of Homeland Security reserved the right to conduct flights on Saturday.

Boasberg indicated that he thought the ACLU lawyers’ arguments were strong, but declined to rule in their favor and block their clients from being sent out of the U.S., saying, “I just don’t see really how you’re asking me to do anything different from what the Supreme Court told me I couldn’t do.”