J.A.V. v. Trump: A Trump-Appointed Judge Reads the Word “Invasion”
- Citation
- J.A.V. v. Trump, No. 1:25-cv-00072 (S.D. Tex. May 1, 2025) (Rodriguez, J.)
- Court
- U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas
- Judge
- Hon. Fernando Rodriguez Jr.
- Statute
- Alien Enemies Act, 50 U.S.C. § 21; 28 U.S.C. § 2241
- Holding
- AEA proclamation exceeds the scope of the statute; “invasion” and “predatory incursion” under § 21 require military hostility by a foreign nation or government, not transnational criminal activity. Class certified for all Venezuelan AEA detainees in S.D. Tex.
Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr., a 2018 Trump appointee to the Southern District of Texas, was the first federal judge in the country to write a merits opinion squarely addressing whether the March 2025 invocation of the Alien Enemies Act survived statutory scrutiny. That fact alone gave his thirty-six-page ruling in J.A.V. v. Trump outsized importance. The opinion’s craftsmanship has given it a longer life: every subsequent district-court ruling against the government — in the Southern District of New York, the District of Colorado, and the District of Columbia — has cited it.
The statutory text
The Alien Enemies Act, codified today at 50 U.S.C. § 21, dates to 1798 and authorizes the President, “[w]henever there is a declared war between the United States and any foreign nation or government, or any invasion or predatory incursion is perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of the United States by any foreign nation or government,” to apprehend and remove citizens of the “hostile nation or government.”
The proclamation invoked the second prong: an “invasion or predatory incursion” by Tren de Aragua, alleged to be operating “at the direction of the Maduro regime.” Judge Rodriguez worked through that text the way a textualist judge of the originalist persuasion would: dictionary entries from the late eighteenth century, contemporaneous diplomatic correspondence, the prior three invocations of the Act (the War of 1812, the First World War, the Second World War). The pattern is consistent. “Invasion” means a hostile entry by an organized military force; “predatory incursion” refers to a smaller-scale armed raid of the kind that drove the Plains Indian Wars and earlier border conflicts. Neither concept reaches transnational criminal organizations whose members enter the country individually and concealedly to traffic narcotics or commit ordinary crimes.
“The President’s factual findings, even afforded great deference, cannot transform a criminal organization into a foreign nation or military expedition.”
The intelligence record
The opinion does not rest on textual analysis alone. The court took notice of an April 2025 National Intelligence Council assessment that the Maduro regime “probably does not have a policy of cooperating with TdA and is not directing TdA movement to and operations in the United States.” The President’s contrary finding is, on the record before the court, contradicted by the Executive’s own intelligence professionals.
Judge Rodriguez accepted the political-question doctrine’s claim on most factual findings about foreign affairs, but distinguished between deference to factual judgment and capitulation to factual fiat. The latter, he wrote, would empty the Act’s statutory predicates of meaning.
Class certification
The court certified a class of all Venezuelan noncitizens detained in the Southern District of Texas (Brownsville, McAllen, Houston divisions) subject to the AEA proclamation. The certification mattered: by the time the opinion issued, the government had begun a practice of moving named plaintiffs out of the district to defeat habeas jurisdiction and individual claims. A class with district-wide reach made that strategy harder.
Significance
The decision’s significance is as much sociological as doctrinal. Coming from a Trump-appointed judge in the most pro-government immigration district in the country, the opinion took the statutory question off the table as a partisan matter. The Fifth Circuit panel that issued W.M.M./A.A.R.P. in September 2025 followed Judge Rodriguez’s textual analysis closely, defining “invasion” as “an act of war involving the entry into this country by a military force of or at least directed by another country or nation, with a hostile intent.” Even after the Fifth Circuit vacated that panel ruling for en banc rehearing, J.A.V.’s reasoning has proven durable. As of this writing, every Article III judge to reach the merits except Judge Stephanie Haines of the Western District of Pennsylvania has ruled the AEA proclamation unlawful.
Filed under The Alien Enemies Act. Published May 1, 2025.