WASHINGTON — Three Venezuelan men who spent months as the named plaintiffs in one of the most consequential immigration lawsuits of the Trump era are no longer in the United States. They were deported under a different law than the one their case challenged, before the court that held their appeal could rule. The full Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, meeting en banc with seventeen judges, declared their case moot on Thursday and dismissed it.
The constitutional question those three men carried into federal court — whether President Trump can invoke an 1798 wartime statute to deport immigrants he designates as members of a foreign criminal organization — remains unanswered.
Trump’s March 2025 proclamation declared that Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang the administration has designated a national security threat, was conducting an “invasion” or “predatory incursion” within the meaning of the Alien Enemies Act. That 1798 law authorized the president to detain or expel nationals of an enemy nation during wartime. Under the proclamation, hundreds of Venezuelans were removed rapidly, some within hours of being detained, before any immigration judge could review their cases.
The legal challenge that followed moved from a trial court block to a three-judge panel ruling against the administration, to a Supreme Court decision in April 2025 that blocked removals without adequate due process and remanded the case to the Fifth Circuit to assess the administration’s legal authority. The Supreme Court told the Fifth Circuit directly: decide whether what Trump did was lawful under the Alien Enemies Act.
On Thursday, the Fifth Circuit declined.
The mechanism of refusal was procedural. The three named plaintiffs had been deported under the Immigration and Nationality Act — the statute governing ordinary removal proceedings, not the Alien Enemies Act proclamation they were challenging. Because the men were gone, expelled through a separate legal vehicle, the en banc court found that their challenge had become moot. A court cannot rule on a controversy that no longer involves living parties with a stake in the outcome, and the administration had removed that stake entirely by deporting the plaintiffs before a ruling could arrive.
“The Supreme Court’s injunction barring use of the Alien Enemies Act remains in place, which is essential because there are still people at risk,” said Lee Gelernt, the ACLU attorney who has led the constitutional challenge since the proclamation’s earliest days.
That injunction is the practical reality the ruling leaves behind. The Supreme Court’s April 2025 order — that no one may be deported under the AEA without receiving notice and a meaningful opportunity to challenge their designation as a Tren de Aragua member — continues to bind the executive branch. But it is an injunction against procedure, not against authority. It says the administration must pause and allow legal review before removing someone. It does not say whether the administration has the legal power to invoke the AEA for gang designations at all.
The Alien Enemies Act has never been used this way in its 228-year history. Prior invocations came during declared wars: against British nationals during the War of 1812, against German and Japanese nationals during the First and Second World Wars. The WWII use authorized the internment of Japanese-Americans — a decision the Supreme Court upheld in Korematsu v. United States in 1944 and later formally disavowed. Courts have never been asked to decide whether the statute’s language — “invasion” and “predatory incursion” — encompasses domestic criminal gang activity by foreign nationals during peacetime.
Trump’s proclamation rests entirely on that extension. Gang members from Venezuela, the administration argues, constitute an invading force under the AEA’s plain text. Federal judges who have reviewed that argument at the preliminary injunction stage have mostly rejected it, finding the administration’s interpretation of “invasion” unlikely to succeed on the merits. “Unlikely to succeed” is not a final ruling, however, and the Supreme Court’s April decision left space for AEA removals to continue provided proper notice procedures are followed.
The Fifth Circuit’s mootness dismissal leaves that space intact. The administration can still designate individuals as Tren de Aragua members and pursue removal under the AEA proclamation — it simply must provide notice first. Whether it has the constitutional authority to do so at all is a question the court just declined to answer.
Other challenges to the proclamation remain pending in courts across the country. The pattern the Fifth Circuit dismissal establishes is troubling for anyone seeking a definitive ruling: the administration can deplete individual cases by using the INA to remove specific plaintiffs through ordinary proceedings before courts can rule on the AEA question, leaving the constitutional issue perpetually unresolved. It is a legal chess move — deport the plaintiff through a different statute, moot the case, repeat.
Earlier this summer, Trump’s immigration agenda ran into a series of judicial checks — from birthright citizenship orders struck down by courts to the State Department’s record pace of visa revocations drawing legal scrutiny. A forthcoming book this summer revealed that Stephen Miller pushed in April 2025 to suspend habeas corpus entirely to accelerate deportations, illustrating an administration consistently willing to test the outer limits of executive removal authority before courts can draw the line.
The Alien Enemies Act gambit is different in kind from those challenges. It does not ask courts to defer on emergency powers or accept an expansive reading of an established statute. It asks them to validate an entirely novel legal theory: that a peacetime government can invoke an 18th-century wartime law against people it designates as enemy combatants without a declared war, a formal invading force, or a treaty defining the conflict’s terms. No analogous use has ever been upheld.
No court has said yes. No court has said no. The Fifth Circuit, faced with a direct instruction from the Supreme Court to decide, found a way to avoid the question entirely. The ruling will return — perhaps when the next group of detainees cannot be removed through a separate statute before their hearing date, perhaps when a circuit split between courts forces the Supreme Court to take up the case on its own terms. For now, the legal framework governing Trump’s most aggressive immigration tool remains exactly as unsettled as it was before the full Fifth Circuit convened on Thursday.
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