Trump cannot use Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelan gang members, appeals court rules – US politics live | US news

Donald Trump has dismissed speculation that he is in ill health, saying he was busy on the Labor Day weekend giving media interviews and visiting his Virginia golf course.

“I was very active over the weekend,” Trump, 79, told reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday. Asked about rumours on social media that he may have died, he called them “fake news”.

The president complained that he had done several news conferences last week “then I didn’t do any for two days and they said ‘there must be something wrong with him’.”

“It’s so fake. ‘Is he OK, how’s he feeling, what’s wrong?’”

Speculation about his health swirled on X over the weekend, with posts citing his lack of a public schedule late last week and a JD Vance interview in which the vice-president told USA Today he was confident the president was “in good shape” but suggested he was prepared to step in if anything happened to Trump.

President Donald Trump will welcome Polish president Karol Nawrocki back to the White House on Wednesday after backing the conservative nationalist in Polish elections, with their meeting likely to focus on Russia’s war in Ukraine and energy security.

Trump extended the invitation days after Nawrocki was sworn in early in August and then intervened to ensure he joined a key telephone call on Ukraine with European leaders instead of his rival, centrist Polish prime minister Donald Tusk, Reuters reported.

The president hosted Nawrocki at the White House in May, backing him at a crucial moment in the Polish election. Nawrocki went on to defeat the candidate of Tusk’s pro-European, centrist party a month later.

Wednesday’s talks are expected to center on stalled negotiations to end the war and Poland’s security concerns, amid signs that Trump has grown frustrated with Russian president Vladimir Putin for failing to move forward on ending the war.

Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog for today. I am Tom Ambrose and I’ll be bringing you the latest news lines over the next few hours.

We start with the news that a federal appeals court ruled on Tuesday that president Donald Trump unlawfully invoked the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelans he alleged were part of a criminal gang.

In a 2-1 decision, a three-judge panel of the Fifth US Circuit Court of Appeals issued a preliminary injunction that blocked the Trump administration from removing a group of Venezuelans under the seldom-used 18th-century law, Reuters reported.

The fifth circuit is the first federal appeals court to rule directly on a March 14 presidential proclamation invoking the 1798 law to justify rapid deportations.

Circuit judge Leslie Southwick, writing for the two-judge majority, rejected the Trump administration’s assertion that the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua had engaged in a “predatory incursion” on US soil.

The act gives the government expansive powers to detain and deport citizens of hostile foreign nations, but only in times of war, or during an “invasion or predatory incursion.”

Southwick was appointed by former president George W Bush. He was joined by circuit judge Irma Carrillo Ramirez, an appointee of president Joe Biden. Circuit judge Andrew Oldham, a Trump appointee, dissented.

The Trump administration could ask the entire 5th Circuit to rehear the case. It is expected to eventually reach the Supreme Court.

“The Trump administration’s use of a wartime statute during peacetime to regulate immigration was rightly shut down by the court,” said American Civil Liberties Union attorney Lee Gelernt, who represented the Venezuelans. “This is a critically important decision reining in the administration’s view that it can simply declare an emergency without any oversight by the courts.”

It comes as Trump claimed that the US military had killed 11 drug traffickers from Venezuela during a “a kinetic strike” in the Caribbean Sea.

Trump trailed the announcement during an address at the White House on Tuesday afternoon, telling reporters the US had “just, over the last few minutes, literally shot out … a drug-carrying boat”.

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In other developments:

• A judge has found the Trump administration’s use of national guard troops during southern California immigration enforcement protests was illegal. Judge Charles Breyer ruled on Tuesday that the administration violated federal law by sending troops to accompany federal agents on immigration raids. The judge did not require the remaining troops withdrawn, however.

• The US House of Representatives oversight committee released thousands of pages of records related to the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein from the justice department. The 33,000 pages included years-old court filings related to Epstein and his former associate Ghislaine Maxwell as well as what appears to be body-cam footage from police searches and police interviews.

• Donald Trump has dismissed speculation that he is in ill health, saying he was busy on the Labor Day weekend giving media interviews and visiting his Virginia golf course. “I was very active over the weekend,” Trump, 79, told reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday. Asked about rumours on social media that he may have died, he called them “fake news”.

• Trump made his first public appearance in a week on Tuesday to announce that the US Space Command (Spacecom) headquarters, which is tasked with leading national security operations in space, would be in the Republican stronghold of Alabama. Flanked by Republican senators and members of Congress at a White House news conference, Trump said Huntsville, Alabama, would be the new location of the space command.

• Trump will welcome Polish president Karol Nawrocki back to the White House on Wednesday after backing the conservative nationalist in Polish elections, with their meeting likely to focus on Russia’s war in Ukraine and energy security. Trump extended the invitation days after Nawrocki was sworn in early in August and then intervened to ensure he joined a key telephone call on Ukraine with European leaders instead of his rival, centrist Polish prime minister Donald Tusk.

• The Kremlin said on Wednesday that Vladimir Putin was not conspiring with China’s Xi Jinping and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un against the United States, and suggested that perhaps president Trump was being ironic with his criticism. Trump said on Tuesday he was “very disappointed” with Putin, and suggested in a post on Truth Social that Xi, Putin and Kim were conspiring against the United States.

• Reform UK leader Nigel Farage is expected to say Britain has become an “authoritarian censorship regime” on a trip to the US after the arrest of Irish writer Graham Linehan. He is due to speak about free speech at the House Judiciary Committee later today.