Six suspected Tren de Aragua gang members arrested in south Alabama, FBI says

FBI Mobile announced on Wednesday that it had arrested six suspected members of Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.

A spokesperson with the agency told WALA that all six arrests were ‘administrative’, meaning the six are not charged with specific crimes, but they were in the country illegally.

These arrests are some of hundreds that have occurred over the past month after President Donald Trump claimed Tren de Aragua was invading the United States and invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a wartime authority that allows the president broader leeway on policy and executive action to speed up mass deportations, as AP News reported previously.

Following U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg’s March order barring the move, the Supreme Court on Monday ruled in favor of the Trump administration.

It ruled that the government can carry out the deportations but said that Venezuelan migrants who are arrested must get a court hearing before they are taken from the United States.

The Alien Enemies Act has only ever been used three times before, all during wars.

Its most recent application was during World War II, when it was used to incarcerate Germans and Italians as well as for the mass internment of Japanese American civilians.

In a previous proclamation, Trump claimed that Tren de Aragua posed “substantial danger” to U.S. residents.

“Over the years, Venezuelan national and local authorities have ceded ever-greater control over their territories to transnational criminal organizations, including TdA,” Trump’s statement reads.

“The result is a hybrid criminal state that is perpetrating an invasion of and predatory incursion into the United States, and which poses a substantial danger to the United States.”

But opponents of the move say that it could let the administration deport any migrant it identifies as a member of the gang without going through regular immigration proceedings and also could remove other protections under criminal law for people the government targeted.