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"Rümeysa can now return to her beloved Tufts community, resume her studies, and begin teaching again," said Noor Zafar, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU.

There’s only one plausible reason why the court would intervene at 1 a.m. on Saturday, before Alito finished his dissent and before the Justice Department even responded to the ACLU’s pleas: It didn’t trust the government to tell the truth or follow the law, including its own directives.

David Fathi, director of the ACLU’s National Prisons Project, called the federal prison system a “deeply troubled agency in urgent need of reform” and said he hoped the new director would tackle the “many systemic problems that have been identified by courts, the Inspector General, and Bureau staff.”

Lee Gelernt, who is heading up the ACLU’s litigation against the use of AEA, said in an email to Slate that “there’s no authority under the immigration laws to send non-Salvadorans to a notorious prison in El Salvador, nor can the Alien Enemies Act be used against anyone during peacetime.’

In the words of the ACLU, the program amounted to “a discriminatory policy that ran counter to the fundamental American values of fairness and equal protection.”