Over the course of one afternoon and evening last month, the Department of Homeland Security loaded three planes with migrants, most of them Venezuelan men whom the Trump administration had determined, on the basis of little to no evidence, to be members of the gang Tren de Aragua. The planes departed Texas and flew across the Gulf of Mexico toward Central America, even as a judge in Washington, D.C., was holding a hearing on whether the U.S. government had the legal authority to remove those men from American soil. When the detainees landed in El Salvador, they were greeted by a phalanx of armed guards and led to the country's notorious prison, the Terrorism Confinement Center, where their heads were shaved and their hands and feet shackled. By this time, the judge had already issued a ruling barring their transfer from the United States'but it was, as Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele smirked on X, 'too late.' This sequence of events is what led to the Supreme Court's emergency...
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