Rejects judge’s options

Rubio rejects judge’s options for Venezuelans illegally deported from US

He said the United States doesn't want to complicate issues with the new leadership.

By Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Monday that it is impossible for the United States to retrieve 137 Venezuelan men who were illegally deported in March after President Donald Trump invoked wartime powers to deliver them abruptly to El Salvador.

Those men were subsequently sent to their native Venezuela in a prisoner swap last July. And the United States’ decision to surgically remove Nicolas Maduro from power earlier this month has left relations between the two countries in a “delicate” state of flux, the top U.S. diplomat wrote in a two-page legal declaration.

Rubio said any effort to inject the fate of the 137 men into nascent negotiations with Venezuela’s new leader, Delcy Rodriguez, would “risk material damage to U.S. foreign policy interests.”

“The United States remains involved to see changes in Venezuela that are beneficial to the United States and that it also expects will be beneficial for the people of Venezuela, who have suffered tremendously. These efforts entail ongoing, intensive, and extraordinarily delicate engagement with elements within the regime of Maduro’s successor, so-called Acting President Delcy Rodríguez,” Rubio wrote, without offering further detail on how U.S. interests were likely to be undercut by negotiating over the deportees.

The secretary’s characterization of the fraught relationship between Venezuela and the United States came in response to an inquiry from U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, who ruled last year that the abrupt deportation of the 137 men violated their due process rights and defied his own order to keep them in U.S. custody. Boasberg has ruled that despite the men’s return to Venezuela, they must be afforded the due process they were denied last year.

Rubio said it would be similarly impossible to remotely arrange bond hearings for the men — and not only because of the talks with the new leadership. He said this approach also included an added risk: “intentional interference by anti-American elements.”

The Justice Department appended Rubio’s statement to a filing submitted to Boasberg late Monday. Attorneys for the department also noted that setting up remote bond hearings would make it almost impossible to confirm the identity of witnesses or pursue potential perjury — in part because there is not an active extradition treaty with Venezuela.

The Trump administration’s response amounts to a rejection of the two options Boasberg offered for remedying the violation of the rights of the deportees. The showdown comes amid months of tension between Boasberg and administration officials, including Trump, who has called for Boasberg’s impeachment over his handling of the dispute.

While it’s unclear precisely how Boasberg will respond to the latest rebuff, DOJ lawyers indicated they plan to ask an appeals court to halt any order the judge issues requiring the administration to provide relief to the deported men.

Trump has claimed the men were gang members, but they were given little or no opportunity to contest that assertion before they were loaded on planes and sent to a notorious high-security prison in El Salvador.