Lawyers for Venezuelans Try Again to Stop Deportations, Now in New York

The Supreme Court this week allowed the administration to resume deportations, saying a case should have been filed in Texas. But the A.C.L.U. said other detainees are being held in the jail of a small New York town.

Lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union on Tuesday renewed their efforts to prevent the Trump Administration from deporting Venezuelan migrants under a wartime powers act, asking a Manhattan judge to again block the White House from using the law.

The filing followed a Supreme Court decision on Monday that had allowed the government to resume deportations, an early ruling on an issue that has set up a major clash between President Trump and the federal judiciary.

The Supreme Court addressed few of the case’s substantive issues. Instead, it ruled on narrow procedural grounds: The justices said that, because the migrants were confined in Texas, the A.C.L.U.’s case should have been filed there, rather than in Washington.

But on Tuesday, the A.C.L.U. filed a similar petition in a New York federal court, noting that two migrants who were subject to deportation were being held in a jail in Goshen.

The administration’s efforts to deport Venezuelan migrants have set off one of the most contentious legal battles of President Trump’s second term. It began last month, after the president invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a seldom-used wartime statute from 1798, seeking to authorize the deportation of people he claimed were members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan criminal gang.

A.C.L.U. lawyers representing the targeted migrants immediately challenged the order in Washington federal court, even as the administration sent at least 137 migrants to a prison in El Salvador. The lawyers have said the government misconstrued the Alien Enemies Act, and that the law was intended to be used only during an “invasion” or “predatory incursion” by a foreign nation or government.