Prof. Nadia Anguiano ’17 Interviewed on MPR About Legality of Deporting Venezuelans

Professor Nadia Anguiano ’17 was interviewed on MPR’s Minnesota Now about the legality of the Trump administration’s deporting of Venezuelans to El Salvador. On Saturday the Trump administration announced that it would use a law from 1798 to deport members of a gang. It did not provide evidence that the roughly 250 immigrants from Venezuela that were getting deported belonged to a gang. On Sunday, a federal judge ordered the administration to stop the deportations and turn the deportation flights around. The Trump Administration has said that because the flights were over international waters when the order came down, it did not need to comply. The situation is setting up a major legal battle over presidential power. Prof. Anguiano said, “President Trump now is in defiance of an order by a federal judge on Saturday ordering planes to arrive back or to come back to the United States. And granted, there's a lot of uncertainty about precise timing. But President Trump publicly is saying that a federal judge does not have the authority to order him to not invoke this act. And so in this particular moment, I think the real showdown, as you might say, is between President Trump and the courts in a really extraordinary case of, in my view, executive defiance of the judiciary.”