The State Department deported 17 more immigrants to El Salvador over the weekend.

They were allegedly members of a Venezuelan gang.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio called the removals a, quote, successful counterterrorism

operation.

This occurred after a federal judge had blocked the administration from invoking a rare

wartime authority to deport hundreds of

immigrants without due process. The president was sharply critical of that judge, and it comes

as he's also taken aim at major law firms for representing clients or cases that conflict with

his administration. For more, we are joined now by Deborah Pearlstein.

She's director of the Princeton Program on Law and Public Policy.

Deborah Pearlstein, thank you so much for being here.

Could you help us understand how the administration is continuing these deportations?

We had one judge, say,

I'm going to block you from doing using this, this alien

enemies act to deport people. And then another judge on Friday said, you can't deport people

who don't have some national connection to the countries you're sending them to. So how are

these deportations continuing?

So thanks for having me. The first thing to say is we don't fully know or know at all what legal basis the president is invoking to continue these deportations. That's in part by design.

It makes it harder to challenge the legality of what he's doing,

but there are several possibilities of what's going on here. One possibility with the recent

deportations of more alleged Venezuelans over the weekend is that the president is continuing

to use authority under the Alien Enemies Act, which he invoked before. If that's what's going on,

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