Celebrating his 100th day in office Tuesday, President Donald Trump invoked a recent brutal kidnapping case in western Washington to justify his rush to deport Venezuelan immigrants.
The day after Trump’s inauguration in January, three men abducted a 58-year-old woman outside her Burien apartment, robbing and shooting her before leaving her for dead along Interstate 90 in Kittitas County, prosecutors allege. Authorities say the men drilled into the woman’s hand with a power drill to get her to reveal her bank card PIN and phone passcode.
King County prosecutors have charged two of the suspects, as of Wednesday.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said the two men so far charged in the case, who are both Venezuelan citizens, have “alleged ties to the notorious Tren de Aragua gang.” ICE has lodged immigration detainers on them so federal immigration agents can take custody if King County releases them, a spokesperson confirmed.
But under state law and county code, the jail can’t release inmates to federal immigration authorities without a warrant.
This case, along with another in Chicago, provided Trump’s rationale Tuesday for using a 1798 law to deport non-citizens without due process.
“That’s why we’ve invoked the Alien Enemies Act to expel every foreign terrorist from our soil as quickly as possible,” Trump said to cheers at his Michigan rally.
“We’re just not taking this crap anymore. We can’t,” he continued.
Last month, Trump formally invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a rarely used law that allows the president to bypass immigration courts to deport people from a “hostile nation or government.” The president can use the statute in times of war or an “invasion” of the United States.
In his March 15 executive order, Trump argued Tren de Aragua members “unlawfully infiltrated the United States and are conducting irregular warfare and undertaking hostile actions against the United States.”
The American Civil Liberties Union quickly challenged the order. In response, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., barred deportation of Venezuelans on Alien Enemies Act grounds. The judge also ordered the Trump administration to turn around planes already en route to a prison in El Salvador. The White House didn’t follow that order.
The U.S. Supreme Court also got involved earlier this month, pausing the Trump administration’s planned deportation of immigrants subject to the Alien Enemies Act.
The ACLU is now asking a judge to force the administration to return more than 130 people still held in El Salvador after deportation.
On Tuesday, the president didn’t stop at immigrants from Venezuela: “They come in from Africa. The Congo, they’ve emptied out their prisons into our country. But they come from Africa, Asia, South America. They come from all over bad parts of Europe.”
The two men charged in the Burien case remained in King County custody Wednesday with bail set at $1 million, as they await trial on attempted murder, kidnapping and robbery charges.
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