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The ACLU asked the Supreme Court to rule on whether the Trump administration can lawfully invoke the Alien Enemies Act for deportations.

The American Civil Liberties Union asked the Supreme Court on Monday to broaden its extraordinary weekend order that temporarily blocked the Trump administration from using a wartime power to deport dozens of alleged gang members detained in Texas.

Lawyers for the Venezuelan migrants say the Trump administration is not complying with an earlier Supreme Court directive to provide detainees with a real opportunity to challenge their planned deportations to a notorious megaprison in El Salvador.

They want the Supreme Court to take up the broader question of whether the administration can lawfully invoke the Alien Enemies Act when, they argue, the United States is not actually at war with the targeted Venezuelan gang, known as Tren de Aragua.

The government “cannot by any stretch be said to comply” with the court’s April 7 order, which said that detainees are entitled to sufficient notice and time to actually seek review before a federal judge, the ACLU’s court filing said.

The case illustrates the growing tension between the Trump administration and a judiciary that has pushed back on many of President Donald Trump’s initiatives to reshape the government and immigration policy. The administration has taken a defiant tone in response to adverse court rulings, particularly after the Supreme Court ordered Trump officials to take steps to return Kilmar Abrego García, a longtime Maryland resident wrongly deported last month to El Salvador.

In the case involving a larger group of potential Venezuelan deportees, the high court’s order about 1 a.m. Saturday seemed to show that a majority of justices were skeptical of the administration’s assurances to lower courts that no deportations were forthcoming.

Legal experts said the high court seemed unwilling to risk waiting to again rule that Trump officials could not quickly send the alleged gang members out of the country without an opportunity to challenge their deportations.

In a dissent to that decision published late Saturday, Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Clarence Thomas criticized their colleagues for acting “hastily and prematurely,” before a lower appeals court could rule on the matter and before the Trump administration had responded to the ACLU’s claims that a busload of migrants was in jeopardy of being deported.

Alito said the full court had been informed that a ruling was forthcoming from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit.

“This Court, however, refused to wait,” Alito wrote.

But a majority of justices appeared to credit the ACLU’s concerns that nearly 30 people were on a bus apparently heading to the airport and bound for the megaprison in El Salvador, where their lawyers told the Supreme Court they would “face life-threatening conditions, persecution, and torture, and may remain for the rest of their lives, incommunicado.”

Just two weeks ago, the justices said that migrants subject to deportation under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 must be notified of their planned removal and that the “notice must be afforded within a reasonable time and in such a manner as will allow them to actually seek” relief in the district where they are detained — and “before such removal occurs.”

In their filing Monday, the ACLU’s lawyers said the government’s actions last week deviated from that order.

Late Thursday, they said, Trump officials gave the largely Spanish-speaking detainees at the Bluebonnet detention center near Abilene, Texas, an English-language notice that they could be removed within 24 hours. The form “nowhere mentions the right to contest the designation or removal, much less explain how detainees could do so,” the filing said.

At a separate court hearing Friday afternoon, Justice Department lawyer Drew Ensign told a judge in D.C. that the government had no plans to fly any of the targeted migrants out of the country Friday night but “reserve[d] the right” to begin flights as soon as Saturday.

Without the Supreme Court’s overnight order, the ACLU said, the government would have deported the alleged gang members before any court had determined whether the Trump administration has the authority to use the wartime power at this moment — and before a court has determined whether the detainees are members of Tren de Aragua.

Solicitor General D. John Sauer, representing the Trump administration, had told the justices it was premature for the Supreme Court to get involved at this stage when lower courts have not addressed the relevant legal and factual questions. Those targeted for removal, he wrote in a Saturday court filing, have received sufficient notice and time to contest their deportations.

He noted that the court’s April 7 order “did not mandate any specific notice procedure.”

The White House has defended Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act as part of the president’s mass deportation efforts. The statute, which has only been used three times previously, allows the president to skip the usual immigration court process to detain and deport anyone age 14 or older from a “hostile nation or government” when the U.S. is at war or if the president determines there is an “invasion” against the nation.

Press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement after the Supreme Court’s order early Saturday that the administration is “confident in the lawfulness of the Administration’s actions and in ultimately prevailing against an onslaught of meritless litigation brought by radical activists who care more about the rights of terrorist aliens than those of the American people.”

On Monday, Trump said on social media that his efforts to launch mass deportations were “being stymied at every turn by even the U.S. Supreme Court, [for] which I have such great respect.”

The justices could respond at any time to the ACLU’s request to provide additional detailed guidance to the lower courts and to keep its order blocking deportations in place.