Minister of Justice and Public Security Héctor Villatoro, right, accompanies U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, center, during a tour of the Terrorist Confinement Center, or CECOT, on March 26, 2025 in Tecoluca, El Salvador. (Photo by Alex Brandon-Pool/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — Federal judges in Texas and New York Wednesday temporarily halted the Trump administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 in parts of those two states where Venezuelans set for deportation are incarcerated.
The American Civil Liberties Union filed cases in the Southern District of New York and the Southern District of Texas, after the U.S. Supreme Court this week deemed challenges to the wartime law must be brought in the location of those subject to President Donald Trump’s proclamation on use of the act. The cases earlier were argued in the District of Columbia.
That Monday decision from the high court lifted a lower court’s order that barred the Trump administration from invoking the wartime law to deport any Venezuelan nationals 14 or older who are suspected gang members — but the justices also said unanimously that the Venezuelans must be allowed court hearings.
Texas Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr. issued a temporary restraining order to prevent the deportation of Venezuelans in the entire state of Texas under the Alien Enemies Act, as well as the facility where the three men who brought the case are currently detained, the El Valle Detention Center in Raymondville.
The restraining order from Rodriguez Jr. is in place until April 23. The order also states that the three Venezuelan men cannot be removed from the El Valle Detention Center, which is the same center from which the Trump administration on March 15 transferred those subject to the wartime law and placed them on a plane to a notorious mega-prison in El Salvador.
New York order
The temporary restraining order from New York Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein that he plans to sign Wednesday would cover Venezuelans in the Southern District of New York, according to The Associated Press. That would include New York City, the boroughs of Manhattan and the Bronx and Dutchess, Orange, Putnam, Rockland, Sullivan and Westchester counties.
Two Venezuelans brought the suit in the Southern District of New York.
Hellerstein, who was appointed by former President Bill Clinton, will hold an April 22 hearing to determine if the temporary restraining order should become a preliminary injunction. The ACLU is also pushing for a class certification.
The Supreme Court said this week it will allow, for now, the Trump administration to use the Alien Enemies Act, but those subject to the proclamation must be allowed to bring a challenge in court.
The original suit against the Trump administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act came from five men detained in Texas. The justices argued that the proper court venue should be where they were being detained in Texas rather than before the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
More than 238 Venezuelans have been deported to the brutal prison, Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, known as CECOT.
Marylander’s case cited
Judge Rodriguez Jr., whom President Donald Trump appointed in 2017, in placing the temporary restraining order noted that anyone who is erroneously deported under the Alien Enemies Act potentially cannot be returned to the United States.
In his reasoning, he cited the Trump administration’s stance in a high-profile case that led to a Maryland man being sent to a prison in El Salvador by mistake.
The Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to strike down a lower court’s order that officials return Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia of Beltsville, Maryland, who had a 2019 court order barring his removal to El Salvador. On Monday the Supreme Court temporarily paused the deadline until the high court could make a full decision.
“Furthermore, if the United States erroneously removed an individual to another country based on the Proclamation, a substantial likelihood exists that the individual could not be returned to the United States,” Rodriguez Jr. wrote.
A hearing in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas in the Brownsville division, is set for Friday 1:30 p.m. Central.
Rodriguez said of the upcoming Friday hearing, “the Court will consider whether to extend the temporary restraining order or issue other forms of emergency relief.”
Jennifer Vasquez Sura, left, and Congressional Hispanic Chair Adriano Espaillat, a New York Democrat, center, talk with Democratic Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, right, after a press conference calling for the return of Vasquez Sura's husband, who was erroneously deported. (Photo by Ariana Figueroa/States Newsroom)
WASHINGTON — Jennifer Vasquez Sura has a message for her husband, who was erroneously deported to a notorious mega-prison in El Salvador by the Trump administration.
“I’m still fighting for you,” she said during a Thursday press conference with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and Maryland Democratic lawmakers who are demanding the Trump administration return Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia to the United States.
Abrego Garcia, a national of El Salvador with deportation protections, was not charged with any offense but was detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement March 12 due to a “change in status.”
Trump officials have admitted his removal on March 15 to the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT, was a mistake, but have stood by their decision.
“This so-called administrative error has destroyed my family’s happiness, my children’s innocence,” Vasquez Sura said, her voice shaking as she took small breaks before continuing to read her statement.
Pleas to president of El Salvador
The chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, Adriano Espaillat, said he is writing a letter to El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele to ask for Abrego Garcia’s release as well as request for a congressional delegation to visit CECOT.
Bukele is scheduled to meet with President Donald Trump at the White House April 14. Espaillat, a New York Democrat, said if he does not receive a response from Bukele, he will ask for a response from Bukele when he visits the White House.
“We don’t know his condition,” Espaillat said of Abrego Garcia. “The family deserves to know his condition, and if they don’t tell us, we will visit the prison ourselves.”
Democratic Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen and Democratic Rep. Glenn Ivey, whose district includes the family’s home in Beltsville, criticized the Trump administration for not only accidentally deporting Abrego Garcia, but labeling him as a MS-13 gang member, despite his lack of a criminal record in any country, including the U.S.
“He was whisked off without any due process, and is now in a torturous … jail in El Salvador,” Van Hollen said.
Senators send letter
In 2019 Abrego Garcia was given removal orders to his home country. He was granted protections from removal by an immigration judge because it was more “likely than not that he would be persecuted by gangs in El Salvador” if he were returned, according to court documents.
On Tuesday, two dozen Senate Democrats sent a letter to U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, demanding Abrego Garcia be returned to the U.S.
The Trump administration was ordered by a federal judge to return Abrego Garcia by Monday, and while the order was unanimously held up by a panel of judges on an appeals court, the U.S. Supreme Court temporarily paused the deadline to return Abrego Garcia.
The high court will make a full decision on whether or not the Trump administration will be required to bring Abrego Garcia back to the U.S.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem delivers remarks to staff at the department's Washington, D.C., headquarters on Jan. 28, 2025. (Photo by Manuel Balce Ceneta-Pool/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — The IRS and Department of Homeland Security reached an agreement Monday to share tax information of immigrants who have final orders of removal to help immigration agents find and deport the immigrants, according to documents filed in court.
No information between the two agencies has been shared yet, according to the filings in federal court in the District of Columbia, but the partnership would impact more than 1 million immigrants with final removal orders, as the Trump administration carries out mass deportations of immigrants without permanent legal status.
According to a memorandum of understanding signed by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and submitted to the court, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials can ask the IRS to provide information about immigrants with orders of removal or immigrants involved in criminal investigations.
Some of that tax information includes sensitive details such as current addresses and information about child tax dependents.
It would be the first time the IRS shared sensitive tax information to carry out immigration enforcement.
In order to file taxes without a social security number, someone who is not a U.S. citizen would use an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number, or an ITIN. As of 2022, there were more than 5.8 million active ITINs, according to a report by the Treasury Department Inspect General.
Groups challenging information sharing
The government filed the document in a case brought by immigration rights groups the Centro de Trabajadores Unidos and Immigrant Solidarity DuPage. The groups are trying to block the IRS from sharing tax records with DHS for immigration enforcement, arguing that such sharing violates IRS disclosure laws.
The Trump administration moved Monday to dismiss the suit in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, arguing that “providing information to assist criminal investigations—is lawful.”
A hearing on a preliminary injunction to block such information sharing between IRS and DHS is set for April 16 before federal Judge Dabney L. Friedrich, whom President Donald Trump appointed in 2017.
Friedrich ruled against the groups last month, when they asked for a temporary restraining order following a story by The Washington Post that the agencies were considering sharing information in order to find immigrants to deport.
“A single news report about future cooperation between the IRS and DHS does not establish that the plaintiffs’ members are facing imminent injury,” according to the March 19 order.
Prisoners look out of their cell as Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem tours the Terrorist Confinement Center or CECOT, on March 26, 2025, in Tecoluca, El Salvador. (Photo by Alex Brandon-Pool/Getty Images)
This story was updated at 10:24 a.m. EDT, April 8
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court Monday said the Trump administration could continue for now to use the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to carry out rapid deportations of Venezuelans suspected of being gang members — but they must be given a chance to challenge their deportations in court.
The 5-4 decision, which lifted a temporary restraining order by a District of Columbia federal judge, will allow the Trump administration to deport Venezuelans 14 and older who are suspected of Tren de Aragua gang ties, in a victory for the administration of President Donald Trump.
But those immigrants who are subject to the wartime law must have “reasonable notice” in order to challenge their deportation in court “before such removal occurs,” according to the order. The question is which court.
The order argues that the venue of the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia is wrong, and that the challenge, which was originally brought by five men in Texas, should be made in the Lone Star State. The challenge is no longer brought by five men and is now a class action.
“The detainees seek equitable relief against the implementation of the Proclamation and against their removal under the (Alien Enemies Act),” according to the Supreme Court. “They challenge the Government’s interpretation of the Act and assert that they do not fall within the category of removable alien enemies. But we do not reach those arguments.”
The president praised the decision, which did not address the merits of the actual law, on social media.
“The Supreme Court has upheld the Rule of Law in our Nation by allowing a President, whoever that may be, to be able to secure our Borders, and protect our families and our Country, itself,” Trump wrote. “A GREAT DAY FOR JUSTICE IN AMERICA!”
Dissenting justices
The three liberal justices dissented: Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. The fourth dissent, in part, came from Amy Coney Barrett, who is considered a member of the court’s six-justice conservative majority.
“The Court’s legal conclusion is suspect,” Sotomayor wrote in her dissent.
She added that the majority opinion did not note the harm that could come to the Venezuelans who could face deportation under the Alien Enemies Act. Already, 238 men have been subject to the proclamation and are currently in a brutal mega-prison in El Salvador, the Terrorist Confinement Center or CECOT.
“It does so without mention of the grave harm Plaintiffs will face if they are erroneously removed to El Salvador or regard for the Government’s attempts to subvert the judicial process throughout this litigation,” she said. “Because the Court should not reward the Government’s efforts to erode the rule of law with discretionary equitable relief, I respectfully dissent.”
A preliminary injunction hearing against the Trump administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act was set for Tuesday afternoon but U.S. District Court Judge James E. Boasberg canceled the hearing in light of the decision of the high court.
That hearing was set to deal with the administration’s use of the law. Instead, Boasberg is setting a deadline of April 16 for the civil rights group that brought the suit to file a notice “indicating whether they believe that they still have a basis to proceed on their Motion for Preliminary Injunction in this Court.”
This was the second decision from the high court Monday that sided with the Trump administration.
Earlier, Chief Justice John Roberts decided to temporarily pause a lower court’s order to require the Trump administration to return to the United States a Maryland man wrongly deported to a prison in El Salvador.
Appeal to the high court
The Trump administration March 28 appealed to the Supreme Court after an appeals court declined to do away with the temporary restraining order placed by Boasberg.
Boasberg had extended his temporary restraining order until April 12 to prevent any more deportations of Venezuelan nationals, invoked by Trump with a presidential proclamation on March 14.
The American Civil Liberties Union brought the suit against the Trump administration’s use of the wartime law. The legal organization asked the Supreme Court to keep the temporary restraining order in place because “it is becoming increasingly clear that many (perhaps most) of the men” who were on the March 15 deportation flights to the prison in El Salvador “were not actually members of” the Tren de Aragua and were “erroneously listed” due to their tattoos.
The same day that Boasberg issued his restraining order, on March 15, three deportation flights landed in El Salvador, where 261 men were taken to the mega-prison.
Boasberg has vowed to determine if the Trump administration violated his restraining order by asking for flight details but the Department of Justice has invoked the so-called “state secrets privilege” to block any information.
Protestors outside the U.S. District Court of Maryland in Greenbelt rally in support of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Maryland father who was deported to El Salvador in an "administrative error,” calling for him to be returned to the U.S. (Photo by Ariana Figueroa/States Newsroom)
GREENBELT, MARYLAND — A federal judge in Maryland Friday ordered the Trump administration to return a national from El Salvador by April 7 who was erroneously deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador, despite an order blocking such removal.
The ruling from U.S. District Court of Maryland Judge Paula Xinis sets up a fight with the Trump administration. Officials have admitted the deportation of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia of Beltsville, Maryland, was a mistake, but have stood by their actions.
The case could also mean that the more than 250 Venezuelan men in a separate case who were removed under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 without due process can be returned to the U.S.
Cheers could be heard outside the courthouse after the order, as dozens of protestors waited for the decision.
Hours later, the Department of Justice appealed the decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit.
‘It was unconstitutional’
Xinis, who was appointed by former President Barack Obama, said “there is no evidence to hold” Abrego Garcia at the notorious prison Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, known as CECOT, and even noted his March 12 arrest by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had no basis for removal.
“That means from the moment he was seized, it was unconstitutional,” Xinis said.
The attorney representing the Department of Justice, Erez Reuveni, said the Trump administration is not challenging the merits of the case and the only argument it has is that the Maryland court lacks jurisdiction because Abrego Garcia is in the custody of El Salvador.
Xinis pressed on what grounds Abrego Garcia was removed to the prison.
Reuveni said he has no idea and was not given any information from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
She asked why Abrego Garcia could not be returned to the United States, which is what his family was seeking in Friday’s preliminary injunction hearing.
Reuveni said that he has asked officials that same question, and has not received an answer that is “satisfactory.”
Reuveni made one request to the court, that Xinis give the administration of President Donald Trump 24 hours to try to rectify the situation.
U.S. paying $6 million
Attorneys for Abrego Garcia are not only asking for him to be returned, but for the Trump administration to cease payments to the mega-prison for his detainment. The White House has stated it’s paying the government of El Salvador $6 million to detain nearly 300 men.
Reuveni said because Abrego Garcia is in custody in El Salvador, he is no longer in U.S. custody and therefore cannot be retrieved.
Xinis pushed back on that argument, noting that the U.S. and El Salvador have a contract to detain the men at the prison.
Reuveni said that it’s not a contract the U.S. and El Salvador have.
Simon Y. Sandoval-Moshenberg, the attorney for Abrego Garcia, contended that “there is significant coordination between the two governments.”
He noted that Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has filmed herself while visiting CECOT and Secretary of State Marco Rubio has a close relationship with El Salvador President Nayib Bukele.
Xinis said to Reuveni that because the U.S. is paying El Salvador $6 million to detain the men, “I can draw the logical argument that the U.S. is the payer.”
She asked Reuveni if he has any evidence to show her that contradicts that knowledge.
“The government made a choice here to produce no evidence,” Reuveni said.
Wartime law invoked
On March 15, three deportation flights left for El Salvador with two planes carrying Venezuelans removed under the wartime law and a third plane that carried nationals from El Salvador, including Abrego Garcia.
A 2019 order from an immigration judge deemed that Abrego Garcia should be removed from the U.S. However, he was granted protection because it was more “likely than not that he would be persecuted by gangs in El Salvador” if he were returned, according to court documents.
Attorneys for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement could have challenged that decision, but did not. Instead, Abrego Garcia was required to check in with ICE every year, including earlier this year.
When Abrego Garcia was driving his 5-year-old son home on March 12, he was pulled over by ICE and informed that his “status had changed,” and was quickly transferred to a detention center in Texas. Within three days he was on a plane to CECOT, despite the order barring his removal to El Salvador.
Xinis asked Reuveni under what authority Abrego Garcia was removed and he said he didn’t know. All he was given was a declaration by ICE Acting Field Office Director of Enforcement and Removal Operations Robert L. Cerna, he said.
“This was an oversight, and the removal was carried out in good faith based on the existence of a final order of removal and Abrego-Garcia’s purported membership in MS-13,” Cerna wrote in a Monday court filing.
Xinis said if the government could not cite what legal authority he was being removed under, “then there is no basis to have seized him in the first place. That’s how I’m looking at it.”
ICE and the Department of Justice have admitted the removal was an “administrative error,” but the Trump administration has stood by its decision.
White House gets involved
Vice President J.D. Vance wrote on social media, without evidence, that Abrego Garcia was a convicted member of the MS-13 gang and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt this week echoed Vance.
“The administration maintains the position that this individual who was deported to El Salvador and will not be returning to our country was a member of the brutal and vicious MS-13 gang,” Leavitt said.
Because of those comments by Leavitt, Sandoval-Moshenberg asked the judge to “keep the government on a tight leash.”
Abrego Garcia does not have a criminal record in the U.S., El Salvador or anywhere else, Sandoval-Moshenberg has stated.
Abrego Garcia came to the U.S. without legal authorization in 2011, fleeing violence in his home country of El Salvador, according to court records. Six years later while he was looking for work at a Home Depot in Hyattsville, Maryland, he was taken into custody by Prince George’s County Police Department.
While there, he was questioned about gang affiliation and law enforcement did not believe he was not a member of the MS-13 gang, according to court records.
The evidence officers submitted included Abrego Garcia wearing a Chicago Bulls hat, a hoodie and a statement from a confidential informant that stated he was a member of MS-13, according to court documents.
While he was never charged with, or convicted of being, in a gang, he was kept in ICE detention while his case proceeded before an immigration judge.
White House Border Czar Tom Homan talks with reporters on the driveway outside the West Wing on March 17, 2025, in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration lost a round Wednesday night in its attempts to use a wartime law for deportations of Venezuelans accused of gang ties.
The 2-1 decision by a U.S. District Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit panel will keep in place a temporary restraining order to prevent any more deportations of Venezuelan nationals ages 14 and older under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, invoked by President Donald Trump.
The Trump administration sent three deportation flights carrying more than 250 men to a notorious mega-prison in El Salvador after the restraining order was issued.
Judge Patricia A. Millett, a nominee of President Barack Obama, and Judge Karen LeCraft Henderson, a nominee of President George H.W. Bush, ruled that the Department of Justice did not meet the requirements to lift the order.
Henderson also noted a presidential proclamation signed by Trump did not set up a due process to allow those accused under the Alien Enemies Act to challenge it.
Judge Justin R. Walker, who was appointed by Trump, agreed with the Trump administration’s request to block the restraining order.
Shortly after the appeals court order, the American Civil Liberties Union, which brought the suit against the Trump administration, filed a request with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, asking for the temporary restraining order to be extended for another 14 days.
The ACLU noted it plans to file a preliminary injunction request on Friday “in which they intend to submit additional factual material so that there is a more complete record.”
A hearing on the preliminary injunction is set for April 8.
Bondi and state secrets privilege
Wednesday’s decision comes after Attorney General Pam Bondi on Monday invoked the “state secrets privilege” to block U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg from obtaining additional information about deportation flights carried out under the Alien Enemies Act.
The privilege is a common-law doctrine that protects sensitive national security information from being released.
From the bench on March 15, he gave a verbal order that blocked the use of the act and ordered anyone on the deportation flights subject to the Alien Enemies Act to be returned to the United States.
The Trump administration has said only two of the three planes carried Venezuelans subject to the proclamation.
Due process
Henderson, in her opinion, noted that the Trump administration “has yet to show a likelihood of success on the merits.”
In oral arguments before the appeals court Monday, the Department of Justice argued that the U.S. District Court lacked the jurisdiction to hear the case and that the Trump administration’s “conduct is lawful under the plain text of the Alien Enemies Act.”
Henderson also raised due process issues. She noted that the temporary restraining order is simply pausing “the summary removal of Venezuelan immigrants to a notorious prison in El Salvador or other unknown locations without first affording them some semblance of due process to contest the legal and factual bases for removal.
“In the government’s view, based on its allegation alone, Plaintiffs can be removed immediately with no notice, no hearing, no opportunity—zero process—to show that they are not members of the gang, to contest their eligibility for removal under the law, or to invoke legal protections against being sent to a place where it appears likely they will be tortured and their lives endangered,” she said.
Millett in her opinion questioned why the Trump administration would ask for an emergency ruling to lift the order from Boasberg because “the government’s persistent theme for the last ten days has been that the district court’s oral direction regarding the airplanes was not a (Temporary Restraining Order) with which it had to comply.”
“But the one thing that is not tolerable is for the government to seek from this court a stay of an order that the government at the very same time is telling the district court is not an order with which compliance was ever required,” she said. “Heads the government wins, tails the district court loses is no way to obtain the exceptional relief of a (Temporary Restraining Order) stay.”
Millett also criticized the Department of Justice for appealing to the circuit court first before trying the district court.
“I would deny the stay on this additional ground,” she said. “The government needs to play by the same rules it preaches. And it needs to respect court rules.”
Judge sides with DOJ
Walker, who appeared to align with the Department of Justice’s arguments on Monday, sided with the Trump administration.
In his opinion he reiterated his stance from Monday’s oral arguments.
Walker again argued that the right way for Venezuelans to object to detention under the Alien Enemies Act is a habeas corpus claim, which is used to challenge an unjust imprisonment, including immigration detention.
The original five men who brought the suit under the Alien Enemies Act, before the federal judge moved to a class suit, were in a detention center in Texas, rather than the District of Columbia.
“The problem for the Plaintiffs is that habeas claims must be brought in the district where the Plaintiffs are confined,” he said. “For the named Plaintiffs at least, that is the Southern District of Texas.”
Tren de Aragua gang
Border Czar Tom Homan said Monday that he was confident that the more than 250 Venezuelans on the deportation flights were members of the Tren de Aragua gang, according to White House pool reports.
Homan said that he got “assurances from the highest levels of (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) that” everyone on the planes were members of the Tren de Aragua.
“We’re talking about terrorists,” he said. “These are not good people.”
Immigration attorneys for the men and family members have said those sent to the mega-prison had no criminal record or were in asylum proceedings before an immigration judge.
President Donald Trump speaks during an executive order signing in the Oval Office at the White House on Feb. 11, 2025, in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — A federal judge late Monday ordered the U.S. government to provide answers about details of the Trump administration’s deportation of immigrants under an 18th-century wartime law after civil rights groups alleged that the administration defied the court’s restraining order reversing the deportations.
The Department of Justice was given four directives by U.S. Judge James Emanuel Boasberg in the District of Columbia that are due in a filing by noon on Tuesday. Among the requirements is a sworn statement that the government did not rely on the 1798 Alien Enemies Act for the authority to deport any of the Venezuelan men flown to El Salvador over the weekend, which would have violated his Friday temporary restraining order.
According to the order, if “the Government takes the position that it will not provide that information to the Court under any circumstances, it must support such position, including with classified authorities if necessary.”
The American Civil Liberties Union wrote in court briefings that the government violated a court order by not turning around deportation flights headed to Honduras and El Salvador late Saturday, despite a restraining order in place hours prior to the flights’ landing.
Four directives
The Trump administration tried to dismiss the case, but Boasberg rejected the motion.
Prior to Monday’s late emergency hearing, the Department of Justice defended the Trump administration’s deportation flights, arguing in a court filing that the federal judge’s “oral directive is not enforceable as an injunction.”
At Monday’s hearing, Boasberg ordered the Department of Justice to issue a sworn declaration that after he issued a restraining order Saturday, none of the men on the deportation flights were removed on the grounds of the Alien Enemies Act.
He also wants to know when the president signed the proclamation and when it went into effect.
Boasberg also asked the Justice Department to report how many people would be subject to the act who are in the U.S. and how many of those people are in custody.
He is asking Department of Justice attorneys for the Trump administration’s “position on whether, and in what form, it will provide answers to the Court’s questions regarding the particulars of the flights,” according to the order.
President Donald Trump on Sunday afternoon posted a highly produced, dramatized video showing what appeared to be the deported migrants in uniform garb, chained, with their hair and beards forcibly shaved by armed prison guards in El Salvador. The men in the video were shoved into maximum security cells in the huge El Salvador prison known as the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo.
The Trump administration has already appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and has urged that court to remove the case from Boasberg.
In a Monday filing to the appeals court, the Trump administration argued that the lower court overreached its authority.
“The Government cannot—and will not—be forced to answer sensitive questions of national security and foreign relations in a rushed posture without orderly briefing and a showing that these questions are somehow material to a live issue,” according to the filing.
The Trump administration is also appealing the lower court’s decision to allow a class action suit to include anyone who is subjected to the proclamation the president issued over the weekend. The ACLU originally brought the suit with five men who are Venezuelan and were threatened “with imminent removal under” the Alien Enemies Act.
“The district court has enjoined the President from using his statutory and constitutional authority to address what he has identified as an invasion or predatory incursion by a group undertaking hostile actions and conducting irregular warfare,” the Trump administration wrote in its Sunday appeal.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said during a Monday press briefing that the Trump administration is confident they are “going to win in court.”
She added that the U.S. paid El Salvador $6 million to detain the 261 men who were deported to the country.
The high-profile dispute is likely to head to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Saturday’s events
The administration had said in a presidential proclamation published Saturday it would be using the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, last invoked during World War II, to detain and remove anyone 14 or older who is a suspected member of the Venezuelan gang, the Tren de Aragua.
In the proclamation, President Donald Trump said he will detain and deport anyone 14 and older who is a suspected member of the Tren de Aragua. There is a carve out for naturalized citizens and lawful permanent residents, or green card holders.
“Evidence irrefutably demonstrates that (Tren de Aragua) has invaded the United States and continues to invade, attempt to invade, and threaten to invade the country; perpetrated irregular warfare within the country; and used drug trafficking as a weapon against our citizens,” according to the Trump proclamation. “As President of the United States and Commander in Chief, it is my solemn duty to protect the American people from the devastating effects of this invasion.”
To block that use of the Alien Enemies Act, the ACLU and other civil rights groups filed an emergency request before Boasberg in the District of Columbia, and a hearing was held at 5 p.m. Eastern on Saturday. Boasberg was nominated by former President Barack Obama in 2011.
Flight records and court briefing show that two U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement flights departed from Texas Saturday – one at 5:45 p.m. Eastern for El Salvador and one at 5:26 p.m. Eastern for Honduras.
Roughly an hour later, Boasberg issued a temporary restraining order and, in his order, told the government to turn around any deportation flights that were currently in the air.
“[A]ny plane containing these folks that is going to take off or is in the air needs to be returned to the United States, but those people need to be returned to the United States,” Boasberg said, according to the court’s transcript. “However that’s accomplished, whether turning around a plane or not embarking anyone on the plane or those people covered by this on the plane, I leave to you. But this is something that you need to make sure is complied with immediately.”
Both flights landed after the orders were given by Boasberg, ACLU argues in its court records.
A third Saturday flight left from Texas to Honduras at 7:37 p.m. Eastern, according to flight records and court briefings.
In filings to the appeals court, the Trump administration argued that the district court did not have the jurisdiction to issue the temporary restraining order and that the president has the authority to use the Alien Enemies Act.
On Sunday, the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, on social media, reposted a news story about the deportation flights that had continued despite a court order.
He responded, “Oopsie… Too late.” U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio reposted the response from El Salvador’s president from his personal account.
Rubio has traveled to El Salvador and met with Bukele to talk about accepting deportations of nationals from other countries. In those meetings, Bukele agreed to accept “members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang” and place them in jail, according to State Department records.
Due process concerns
U.S. immigration law already gives the authority to investigate, arrest and remove immigrants who are engaging in criminal activity or harm in the country, and the wartime authority to go after the Tren de Aragua is not needed, said Katherine Yon Ebright, counsel in the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program.
She said Trump invoking the wartime authority is not about “going after people who are provably committing crimes or harming American communities.”
“It’s about going after Venezuelans without due process because this law gives the president the power to say that … they’re dangerous, and just remove them without proving anything to an independent adjudicator, without any evidence that actually underlies that determination,” she said.
Immigrants subject to the Alien Enemies Act would not have access to an immigration judge or court hearing under the law.
He previewed in his inauguration speech his intentions to designate cartels as foreign terrorist groups in order to use the Alien Enemies Act.
“By invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, I will direct our government to use the full and immense power of federal and state law enforcement to eliminate the presence of all foreign gangs and criminal networks bringing devastating crime to U.S. soil, including our cities and inner cities,” Trump said during the Jan. 20 address.
In order for the Alien Enemies Act to be invoked, an invasion by a foreign government must occur, and in the executive order relating to the cartels, the Trump administration argues that they are a foreign entity. The cartels that the Trump administration singles out in the order are the MS-13 gang and the Tren de Aragua.
U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has already revoked protections granted to roughly half a million Venezuelans under the Biden administration. In early February, she declined to renew Temporary Status Protections for 350,000 Venezuelans that are set to expire April 2. In her reasoning, she cited gang activity.
Ebright noted that the last time the act was invoked, during World War II, many of the Japanese, Italian and German immigrants who were detained had some form of legal status.
“I would put money on it that this proclamation is going to cover people who are lawfully present,” she said.
Historical use of Alien Enemies Act
The last time the Alien Enemies Act was invoked was after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941.
But even after World War II ended in 1945, the Alien Enemies Act was still in place for several years, along with the continuation of internment camps, because Congress and the president had not formally terminated the declaration of war, Ebright said.
She said that the U.S. Supreme Court upheld then-President Harry Truman’s extended use of the Alien Enemies Act three years after World War II on the grounds that “it would be too political for the courts to intercede and say that this wartime authority had lapsed.”
“That is something that makes talking about the Alien Enemies Act and the potential for abuse very important, but it doesn’t mean that the courts truly are powerless to step in and prevent a clear abuse of the authority right,” she said.
Ebright said there’s a distinction between the Pearl Harbor attack during World War II and present day.
“Today, you don’t have anything remotely close to a wartime context,” she said. “Judges have eyes, they can see that there has not been a second Pearl Harbor perpetrated by a gang.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth receives a briefing from Navy Adm. Alvin Hosley at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, Cuba on Feb. 25. 2025.(Photo by Army Staff Sgt. ShaTyra Cox)
WASHINGTON — A federal district court judge late Friday denied a temporary restraining order request from legal advocacy groups seeking access to their clients while they were detained at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, following a last-minute transfer by the Trump administration.
Because there are no longer any detainees at Guantanamo, the request was denied by U.S. District of Columbia Judge Carl J. Nichols, who was appointed by President Donald Trump in 2019.
He also denied a request in a separate suit brought before him to bar the potential transfer of 10 individual detainees to Guantanamo because it had not happened yet and therefore could not constitute irreparable harm.
“None of these 10 plaintiffs is currently detained at Guantanamo Bay,” Nichols said of the second request.
Nichols is hearing both cases related to immigration detention at Guantanamo after Trump directed his administration to prepare for up to 30,000 beds there to be used for detention space as part of his plans for mass deportations.
The first suit argued the Trump administration denied legal access to migrants at the base.
The second challenged the legal authority of the Trump administration to send immigrants on U.S. soil and without legal status to a military base outside the country.
The second suit also included the request to block 10 detainees’ potential transfer. Nichols said he was skeptical the detainees would fit the “high profile” that would warrant detention at the base.
Taken to Louisiana
The American Civil Liberties Union filed both suits on behalf of legal aid groups for the immigrants and their family members.
Within days of the hearing, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement transferred all detainees — including the ones whose family filed suits on behalf of them — from Guantanamo to the U.S. mainland in Louisiana.
The ACLU’s Lee Gelernt, who argued on behalf of the advocacy groups and families and 10 individuals, said the federal government has twice cleared out all migrants from Guantanamo just before court hearings.
Even though there are now no immigrants at the base, there is irreparable harm because detainees have been chained, strip searched and subjected to “the general trauma of being sent to a military base,” Gelernt said.
He argued that it’s unprecedented for an administration to transfer detainees already on U.S. soil to a military base.
Gelernt argued that the Trump administration was using detention at Guantanamo Bay “for general deterrence.”
He noted how highly publicized the administration had made transfers to the base, distributing photos and using military planes.
Judge skeptical
Nichols seemed skeptical the Trump administration had admitted to using detention as an immigration deterrent.
“They’re saying mass removal is the deterrent, not sending people to Gitmo,” Nichols said.
Nichols also raised issue with the family members who filed on behalf of the men who were taken to Guantanamo Bay. He said that because those detainees are back on U.S. soil, they should be allowed to bring their own suit.
Additionally, he said because those individuals were no longer at Guantanamo, the harm of the family members “has already subsided.”
However, Nichols said that “there’s a serious question on the government’s authority to open detention facilities (that) extends to military bases overseas.”
Nichols also told U.S. Department of Justice attorneys that the court should be notified if one of the 10 individuals in the suit trying to bar the government from sending those detainees to Guantanamo is transferred to the naval base.
Gelernt pressed to have the Department of Justice give notice before any transfer occurred, but Nichols held off on immediately doing that.
Nichols asked the Department of Justice attorneys to determine with the Department of Homeland Security how quickly a notification can be made to the court and asked them to report back an answer by Wednesday.
Last month, a judge in New Mexico blocked the Trump administration from moving three men detained in that state to Guantanamo. Less than 24 hours after the judge blocked the transfer, ICE deported the three men back to Venezuela.
Mercedes Falk, executive director of the nonprofit Puentes/Bridges, which takes Midwestern dairy farmers to Mexico to meet their workers' families, talks with Teresa Juarez Tepole in her home | Photo by Ruth Conniff/Wisconsin Examiner
VERACRUZ, MEXICO — John Rosenow climbed into a pickup truck in Zongolica, a small city in rural southern Mexico, squeezing into the front with several friends and relatives from Wisconsin and Minnesota. In the back of the truck, six more people crowded onto benches, holding onto each other as the truck bounced over rutted dirt roads, climbing into the clouds as it traveled among little mountain villages in the state of Veracruz. The truck slowed down for a girl herding goats across the road and passed tiny wooden houses perched on the steep mountainside, with chickens in the yard and a few cows tied up by their horns.
During the second week of President Donald Trump’s new administration, as rumors swirled about a surge in deportation raids across the country, a couple of Wisconsin dairy farmers and a dozen of their neighbors and relatives traveled to rural southern Mexico to visit the families of the farmers’ Mexican employees. Wisconsin Examiner editor Ruth Conniff joined them. Her series, Midwest-Mexico Connections, looks at the bond between rural people in the two countries.
“This never gets old,” said Rosenow, a 75-year-old dairy farmer from Waumandee, Wisconsin, who has made the same trip every winter since 2001, often joined by other dairy farmers who come to visit the families of their Mexican workers. He warned the group he might cry when he met up with some of his former employees. One current employee he’s particularly close to, Roberto, was contemplating moving home in December, but decided against it. “Man, that was the best Christmas present,” he said.
Along the way, the group saw wooden shacks with no indoor plumbing, dirt floors and tin roofs sitting next to big brick houses with shiny tile floors — the bigger houses built with money sent home by Mexican workers laboring in the U.S.
Economic interdependence and decades-long relationships have long bound dairy farmers in Wisconsin and nearby Minnesota to Mexican workers and their families.
Of Rosenow’s 18 employees, 13 are from Mexico. That’s not unusual. Latin American workers, most of them from Mexico, perform an estimated 70% of the labor on Wisconsin dairy farms. The money they send home has lifted many of their families out of poverty. And without them, dairies like Rosenow’s would go belly-up. Yet almost all of the immigrant workers who milk cows in the U.S. lack legal status. That’s because, while the U.S. government provides visas for migrant workers who pick seasonal crops and for immigrants with specialized technical skills, there is no U.S. visa program for low-skilled labor in year-round industries like dairy.
In San Juan Texhuacán, about an hour up the mountain from Zongolica, Rosenow and the group visited Fatima Tepole, 42, who milked cows on a farm in Minnesota for four years, from 2012 to 2016, saving enough money to build a house next door to her parents and siblings and to start her business, a little school supply store.
“Here the average worker can make 300 pesos a day,” (about $15) she said. “There you can make that much in an hour.” (Her estimate is close to what Mexican government data shows: Mexico’s average monthly salary is the equivalent of $297 U.S. dollars, or about $15 per day for a five-day workweek. Subsistence farmers in rural Veracruz generally make less and work longer hours.)
Fatima Tepole at dinner in her parent’s home with the Bridges group | Photo courtesy Puentes/Bridges
The visitors from the U.S. gathered in Tepole’s parents’ kitchen to learn how to make tortillas on a wood-burning stove. Then Tepole and her family served them a feast – meat stewed in green chili sauce with fresh tortillas and cheese and bean tostadas. Tepole had hosted many other Bridges groups over the years, including the farmer she worked for in Minnesota. “You’re the first Americans deported by Donald Trump!” she joked.
Building a house — ‘our biggest dream’
Tepole’s sister-in-law, Celeste Tzanahua Hernández, 31, stood near the stove while the group ate. “We thank you for visiting us,” she said. “It’s good that other people know that we’re not all bad people — that people know and can value the work and sacrifices we are making.”
Tzanahua Hernández’s husband, who previously milked cows and now works at a sawmill, has been away from his two children, ages 5 and 12, for the last three and a half years while working in the U.S., she said. They expect him to return in a few months.
Waiting for him has been “a heavy emotional burden,” she said. But with the money he sends home, supplemented with her earnings as a preschool teacher, they’ve been able to build a home — a spacious, open-plan living area and modern kitchen attached to the compound where the extended family lives — buy a used car and afford school tuition, music lessons, tae kwon do, dental work and doctor’s appointments for the children.
When he comes home, her husband is planning to buy some equipment and set himself up in business as a builder.
Lately the family has been worried about Trump’s deportation threats.
Celeste Tzanahua Hernández and her children, Romina, 5, and Johan, 12, in their new home. | Photo by Ruth Conniff/Wisconsin Examiner
“My husband saw ICE at a restaurant. It scared him a lot. That would not be the best way to have to come home,” Tzanahua Hernández said. “He has a car there. He wants to sell it. My dad is worried about what will happen if he goes to jail, or if he has to leave with no money — and how they treat immigrants on the border.”
The family has urged him to send home his valuables: “If he has some good shoes, good things, start sending them home so he doesn’t lose them,” Tzanahua Hernández said.
“He comforts us by saying that the situation is not so dangerous,” she added. “But we see the news reports — the young men who had recently arrived and now have been deported. … He says he feels better knowing that now our house is built, which was our biggest dream.”
Tepole and other Mexican workers estimated that it costs $25,000 to $35,000 to build a small house — the goal of many who are sending home money from jobs in the U.S. The strength of the dollar means the money people earn in the U.S. goes much farther in Mexico.
“For the first year you work there, you pay off your debt to cross the border,” Tepole said. Border crossings can cost between $11,000 and $15,000, workers told the Examiner. “If you work really hard you can do that in seven or eight months,” Tepole said. “After another year, you have enough to start building. But you are also covering expenses for your family. So it depends on those expenses how far you get. After that, in two or three more years you can finish your house if you give it your all.”
“Young people can do it faster,” she added. “It takes more time if you are paying expenses for your kids.”
The Bridges group meets with Maria Primitiva, center, who has children working on farms in the U.S.
Money sent home to Mexico by workers in the U.S. is the country’s largest single source of foreign income — more than Mexico brings in from tourism, exports of manufactured products or petroleum sales. In 2023 Mexico received $63.3 billion in remittances from its citizens who labor in the U.S. — about 4.5% of total GDP — according to a recent report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Mexico ranks second only to India for the size of the contribution made by people working abroad to their home country’s economy. And the amount of money sent home by Mexican workers in the U.S. has increased dramatically in recent years, by roughly 32% between 2019 and 2023, according to the same report. Beyond covering families’ basic expenses, remittances drive economic development, “providing households with the means to save money and make investments in education, upskilling, and community improvement,” the report found.
On the U.S. side, undocumented workers pay about $97 billion in total taxes, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. About $26 billion of that goes to fund Social Security and $6 billion for Medicare — programs from which those workers are excluded. “We shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking immigrants are taking money out of the pot,” says David Kallick, director of the Immigration Research Initiative in New York. His group has done a lot of research over the years “to show how immigration is a big contributor to the overall economic success of this country,” Kallick adds. “But the economic damage done by tearing people away from their jobs is even bigger.”
“You’re talking about 19% of the labor force and $4.6 trillion in economic output,” Kallick says of immigrant workers’ overall contribution to the U.S. economy. Deporting the estimated 11 million workers in the U.S. without legal status would have devastating ripple effects from the loss of farms, restaurants, construction projects, home health care and child care, he says. “We have a broken immigration system that has made it possible for people to become very much part of the economy across the board, and yet to be trapped in the lowest wage jobs in every sector.”
“The reality,” he adds, “is there are not enough U.S.-born people to take the place of millions of people doing these jobs who are undocumented.”
One unintended consequence of the militarization of the U.S./Mexico border is that workers without authorization who would otherwise go home to Mexico have stayed in the U.S. for longer stints in recent years, knowing that once they go home they might never be able to cross the border again to come back.
‘When they go, it’s sad’
A rooster in the mountains of Veracruz, Mexico. | Photo by Ruth Conniff/Wisconsin Examiner
Up the hill from Fatima Tepole’s house, her friend Teresa Juarez Tepole, age 48, has four adult children between the ages of 26 and 33 who are working in the U.S, while she takes care of their children. Mercedes Falk, a translator on about 20 dairy farms in Wisconsin and Minnesota, and the director of the nonprofit group Puentes/Bridges, which organized the trip to Mexico, told Teresa that the farmer one of her sons works for in Minnesota is “an incredible person,” who wants to give her son special training so he can advance in his job. Teresa was glad to hear it. “He has confidence in my son,” she said, smiling.
When her children were very small their father died, Teresa said, and she barely scratched out a living by taking in washing and making tortillas. Sometimes the family was hungry.
She couldn’t afford to send the children to school beyond the early grades. From the time they were little, they helped with the washing and making tortillas. Her oldest son started working in a bakery as a teenager. “They’d give him four or five loaves of bread and he would bring them home, because I couldn’t afford to buy bread,” she said.
Now they’ve all gone to the U.S. “to see their kids grow up, to give them an education, too, because here there’s no money.”
Her granddaughter is in secondary school. “I can’t read or write well, but I tell my granddaughter she has to study hard because her mother is suffering so she can study,” she said.
Teresa’s 30-year-old daughter has been in the U.S. for the last three and a half years. She picked fruit for the first year and a half and for the last two years has been milking cows on a dairy farm in Minnesota.
“When they go, it’s sad,” Teresa said. “You don’t know how long it will take them, when they’ll arrive, how they’ll be treated … I cried a lot.”
Even though she is proud of her children, she misses them, she said. “When they were growing up, at dinner time we always sat down together.”
And now, on top of the loneliness, there is more worry, she said. “With the president there, I start thinking of my kids and, my God, there they are and what if he throws them out? What if they’re mistreated? … There’s nothing to do but put ourselves in God’s hands, may he protect us.”
Hoping there aren’t mass deportations
At each stop on the Puentes/Bridges trip, people asked about Trump’s planned deportations.
Rosenow told several families that Brooke Rollins, Trump’s agriculture secretary, has said that deportations won’t hurt dairy farms. Rollins testified during her confirmation hearings that she supported Trump’s plan for mass deportations but that she would work with the administration to “make sure none of these farms or dairy producers are put out of business.”
“I’m counting on that,” Rosenow said. During the trip, his wife called with another worry: Trump’s tariffs were reportedly about to wreak havoc with exports of butter to Canada and drive up the price of the peat moss they import to make the compost they sell on their farm.
Dairy farmer John Rosenow in Mexico, visiting the relatives of his employee Roberto , (left to right) Veronica, Gerardo, Meagan and Concepciona | Photo by Ruth Conniff/Wisconsin Examiner
At a stop outside the little town of Astacinga, the conversation again turned to deportation. Rosenow stopped to visit the family of his favorite employee, Roberto, 45, and Kevin, Roberto’s 21-year-old son, who came North a few years ago to work with his dad on the farm.
In the kitchen, Rosenow told Roberto’s mother, Concepciona Acahua Macoixtle, 62, , with Falk translating, “Roberto is my best friend. He gets along with anybody. And he has become a better golfer than me.” The two men golf together every week during the season, and Roberto has become something of a local celebrity on the golf course in Buffalo County.
Rosenow got out his phone to show a picture of Roberto playing golf.
Roberto’s wife, Veronica, asked how her son Kevin was behaving. Assured by Rosenow that he was “a delight,” she then turned to her other worry. “Is there a lot of immigration enforcement up there?” she asked.
“There are a lot of rumors, but I have a lot of confidence in the secretary of agriculture,” Rosenow said, once again explaining that he’s relying on Rollins’ assurance that farms won’t go out of business because of immigration enforcement.
“If not, tell my husband to come home,” Veronica said. “Or his boss should get him a visa.”
“I’d do it in a moment,” Rosenow said, as Falk translated.
Falk explained that six-month visas are for seasonal work and dairy farmers can’t apply for them for their workers. Roberto’s mother nodded. “You have to work every day.”
“Some people are getting grabbed by immigration,” she said. Restaurant workers from nearby Astacinga were deported to tent cities in the north of Mexico, she said, adding, “that’s why we’re worried about our children.”
Veronica’s son Aaron, 15, wanted to go up North, too, but Kevin calls and lectures him about staying in school, his mother told the group. Now he’s going to high school in Astacinga and will graduate in a couple of years, Veronica said.
Rosenow arrives at Roberto’s house | Photo by Ruth Conniff/Wisconsin Examiner
Concepciona’s grandchildren have vastly different lives from her own life growing up, or that of her children. Her mother died when she was 4 and she never went to school. Instead she tended the family’s sheep when she was young and met her husband at 18, when both were working in the fields cutting sugar cane.
When they were raising their children, Concepciona said, “We all lived together in one kitchen room. Sometimes there wasn’t enough food. They didn’t have shoes sometimes. They didn’t always have tortillas.”
As a teenager, Roberto went to work and took care of his little siblings, sending home money from jobs in Mexico City and later Kentucky, so they would have enough to eat. He first went to the U.S. when he was 16, but returned several times — the last time was when Meagan, 10, was born. He hasn’t been home since she was 3 months old.
“I told him to come home, but he doesn’t,” Concepciona said. “It’s not that he doesn’t want to. The problem is here there’s no money. There, he can earn money to help with his kids’ education. Ten years he’s been there.” She began to cry.
“My mother- in-law has lost all five of her sons. They’re all up there,” said Veronica.
During the years Roberto has spent in the U.S., he has built a home for his parents, and Veronica has overseen the excavation and building of their own two-story home with a carport, which looks like it was transplanted to the mountainside from a U.S. suburb. Brick pillars frame a heavy metal gate, behind which a manicured grass lawn is surrounded by a low rock wall and a garden full of fruit trees, palms and rose bushes.
Veronica and Roberto also purchased more land nearby, where they keep a flock of sheep. With some of his earnings Roberto has helped his nieces go to college. One is finishing up studying to be a teacher and lives with Veronica, she said.
Meagan, a fifth grader, has always gotten good grades, Veronica said proudly. Meagan gave the U.S. visitors an impromptu performance of the Mexican national anthem in Nahuatl — she’d been practicing for a competition at her bilingual Spanish/Nahuatl school.
As the Puentes group got ready to leave, Concepciona said, “Tell my boys to take care. Ask when they are coming. They always say August, December. Then the next December comes and they don’t arrive.”
“The problem is the risk if they don’t have papers,” said Veronica, “so they can’t come back.”
This article is Part One in a series. In Part Two, the U.S.-born son of a deceased Mexican dairy worker meets his extended family in Mexico for the first time.
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