ICE moves detainees to Texas facility where judge declined to halt deportations

As the Trump administration battles to use a wartime law to speed deportations of alleged gang members, it has moved dozens of detained Venezuelans to the one court district in the nation where a federal judge for now has declined to stand in its way.

U.S. District Judge Wesley Hendrix, a Trump appointee sitting in the Northern District of Texas, refused last month to pause removals under the Alien Enemies Act of detainees who the government says are affiliated with the Tren de Aragua gang — even as judges in Colorado, Pennsylvania, New York and other parts of Texas have done so.

The administration views Hendrix’s district as a “favorable venue,” American Civil Liberties Union attorney Tim Macdonald alleged at a recent court hearing in Denver. He and other immigrant advocates say the rush of relocations to the Bluebonnet Detention Facility in Anson, Texas, has forced targeted Venezuelans to contest their removals in a court they see as ideologically aligned with the president.

“What the government was doing,” Macdonald said in the hearing, “was finding Venezuelan men, rounding them up and shipping them to the Northern District of Texas.”

The Department of Homeland Security declined to answer questions about how many Venezuelan migrants are housed at Bluebonnet. It also would not say how many had been moved there from other facilities in recent weeks or why those transfers were made.

For now, the Supreme Court has indefinitely paused all Alien Enemies Act deportations in Hendrix’s district as it weighs whether migrants there are being given adequate opportunity to challenge their designations as “alien enemies.” The administration does not appear to have deported any migrants under the law from anywhere in the country since it first sent more than 130 Venezuelans to a notorious prison in El Salvador in March.

But the justices could at any time lift the restriction they imposed on April 19, potentially clearing the way for a rash of swift deportations of Venezuelans detained in Texas.

In one instance, a Philadelphia man was transferred to Bluebonnet in apparent violation of a court order requiring that he be kept in Pennsylvania as his case played out there. The judge in that case has not accused U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement of purposefully defying her order, and the agency maintains that its disregard of her instructions was inadvertent.

A Washington Post review of court records revealed other instances in which migrants detained in California and other parts of Texas were moved to Bluebonnet, in some cases just hours before their attorneys could seek relief from courts in the jurisdictions where they were originally held.

Advocates say the transfers to Bluebonnet demonstrate the lengths to which the Trump administration will go to carry out one of the most controversial parts of its deportation agenda.

Three lower-court judges have concluded that Trump exceeded his authority in invoking the wartime law because the United States is not at war with Venezuela — a question that is likely to end up before the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, the ACLU has asked the justices to clarify how much notice potential deportees must be given to challenge their removals.

The organization’s lawyers say they have been playing an urgent game of “whack-a-mole” since the Supreme Court ruled April 7 that migrants must contest deportations under the Alien Enemies Act in the judicial districts where they are detained.

ICE has almost complete control over where it houses its detainees. That means it can essentially decide the courts in which challenges are filed by moving targeted Venezuelans to detention centers in specific judicial districts.

“Because the government is seeking to remove people with only 12 hours’ notice and is constantly moving people in secret from one location to another, we have been forced to file multiple habeas actions throughout the country, often in the middle of the night,” said Lee Gelernt, an ACLU attorney who has led the organization’s legal fight against the Trump administration’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act. “But we are prepared to continue doing that so that individuals are not sent to a brutal gulag-like prison in El Salvador without receiving their day in court.”

The Bluebonnet facility lies on an isolated stretch of the Texas plains about 25 miles north of Abilene. Jennifer Ibañez Whitlock, senior policy counsel at the National Immigration Law Center, said sending detainees there could make it easier for ICE to group them together before putting them on a deportation flight.

“ICE flights are very expensive,” she said. “Having facilities where you’re not having to fly someone multiple times to get them out of the country probably makes sense, and Bluebonnet would be there for that reason.”

But the Northern District of Texas is also known for its conservative rulings. It emerged as a go-to court for Republicans seeking to challenge Democratic policies during the Biden administration.

Hendrix, based in Lubbock, is the only federal judge assigned to the Northern District division where Bluebonnet is located, ensuring that all criminal and civil cases filed there end up in his courtroom.

On April 17, he denied a request from two Bluebonnet detainees to pause Alien Enemies Act deportations in the district while they argued their cases contesting their removals. He said he didn’t consider it necessary to order a pause, because Justice Department lawyers had assured him they would not deport the two detainees until he’d ruled on their case.

Days earlier, ICE began transferring dozens of other alleged gang members to Bluebonnet, sometimes racing against the clock to do so before their attorneys could secure court orders that would keep them in the states where they were originally detained.

A judge in Colorado barred the transfer of detainees out of her district on April 14, after ACLU lawyers reported that Venezuelans accused of Tren de Aragua affiliation had been roused from their beds that morning and told they soon would be moved. Attorneys for a 22-year-old Venezuelan farmworker say ICE moved their client out of California nearly a full day before revealing his change in location. The government now insists that a lawsuit the farmworker filed in that state should be heard in Hendrix’s Texas court.

And in Pennsylvania, lawyers for a man housed at the Moshannon Valley Processing Center, the largest immigration detention facility in the Northeast, secured an order April 16 barring their client’s transfer out of state. But ICE put him on a plane to Bluebonnet anyway that same afternoon.

Initially, the Justice Department maintained that the detainee — a construction worker identified in court filings by the initials A.S.R. — had been loaded onto a bus and driven to a neighboring court district about 10 minutes before the lawsuit challenging his removal was entered onto court dockets. As a result, government lawyers argued, the judge who barred his transfer never had jurisdiction over his case, and her order blocking his removal was invalid.

ICE later conceded that account was not true. The agency had moved the man out of the court district roughly 20 minutes after his case was filed. Though A.S.R. remains at Bluebonnet, his case remains before the federal court in Pennsylvania.

Advocates say the events that played out at Bluebonnet after the man’s arrival underscore the extent to which the place a detainee is located can affect his fate.

Hours after Hendrix said he would not immediately block Alien Enemies Act deportations at Bluebonnet — because the government had promised not to remove the two men who had sued — dozens of other Venezuelans housed at the facility were handed notices, written in English, telling them they had been designated “alien enemies” and would be deported within days.

The next day, the government loaded about 30 migrants onto buses headed to an airport in Abilene for a deportation flight bound for El Salvador, according to sworn statements from several of the targeted men and filings from ACLU lawyers in court.

The buses turned around only after attorneys for the men took their case to a federal appeals court and, eventually, the Supreme Court, resulting in the justices’ unusual 1 a.m. order barring Alien Enemies Act deportations in the Northern District of Texas for now.

The high court acted before the appeals court could issue its decision — a move Georgetown Law professor Steve Vladeck described as “a sign that a majority of the justices have lost their patience with the procedural games being played by the Trump administration,” at least relating to the cases involving the Alien Enemies Act.

In a recent court filing before Hendrix, ACLU lawyers stressed the need for a more permanent action from the courts.

“There is nothing stopping the government,” they wrote, “from moving people to a different facility and once again attempting to swiftly remove them.”