The Trump administration said it arrested and expelled hundreds of alleged members of Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua gang to El Salvador for imprisonment, even as a federal judge ordered a halt to some deportations.

“This weekend, at the President’s direction, the Department of Homeland Security successfully arrested nearly 300 Tren De Aragua terrorists, saving countless American lives,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Sunday in a statement. “These heinous monsters were extracted and removed to El Salvador where they will no longer be able to pose any threat to the American People.”

The U.S. is paying El Salvador to hold the Venezuelans under an agreement Secretary of State Marco Rubio brokered with the central American country’s president, Nayib Bukele, who said on X that 238 members of the gang were transferred to a terrorism confinement center.

On Saturday, Trump moved to accelerate the deportations by invoking seldom-used powers under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a statute previously employed to justify the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. The precise timing of the transfers wasn’t immediately clear. The U.S. also has not publicly detailed how it identified the Venezuelans as members of the Tren de Aragua gang that’s been designated a foreign terrorist organization.

The announcements came as U.S. District Judge James Boasberg barred deportations under Trump’s proclamation for 14 days, allowing time to consider a legal challenge to the move brought by the American Civil Liberties Union and Democracy Forward. In proceedings Saturday, Boasberg said any flights that carried people deported under Trump’s proclamation would have to be returned midair to the U.S., according to the Associated Press.

Trump rooted his proclamation in assertions that many of the organization’s members “have unlawfully infiltrated the United States and are conducting irregular warfare and undertaking hostile actions” against the country.

The president also argued Tren de Aragua is engaging in “mass illegal migration to the United States” in a bid to harm the country’s citizens, undermine public safety and support efforts by Venezuela President Nicolas Maduro to destabilize democratic nations.

Trump in his second term has moved to ramp up deportations of undocumented migrants and secure U.S. borders in the wake of an election victory driven partly by voter anxiety over illegal immigration and crime. As in his first administration, courts across the U.S. have slowed or blocked his ability to fully enact his orders.

Under the Alien Enemies Act the president can detain and remove noncitizens of hostile nations in wartime, powers which have been tapped rarely in U.S. history. Opponents argue the authority cannot be used to target members of a criminal enterprise, rather than a country.

Leavitt on Sunday defended the action, calling Tren de Aragua “one of the most violent and ruthless terrorist gangs on planet earth.”

“They rape, maim and murder for sport,” she said, adding that they are “responsible for some of the most heinous crimes that have occurred on U.S. soil in recent years.”

Trump later thanked El Salvador and its president in a post on Truth Social. Meanwhile, the administration asserted in a court filing that some of the deportations happened before the judge’s order. The administration added that it won’t pursue any more removals under the proclamation unless the court intervenes or removes the restraining order. Five individuals who were subject to an earlier order blocking their removal are still in the U.S., the administration said in its filing.

The Venezuelan government posted on Telegram that the U.S. proclamation “infamously and unfairly criminalizes” Venezuelan migrants, describing it as recalling “humanity’s most dark moments.”

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(With assistance from Hadriana Lowenkron.)

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