Most members of Congress, when a policy blows up, go quiet. Jeff Crank went the other way. He wrote a resolution.

On April 7, 2025, Crank introduced H. Res. 295, "Expressing Support for the President's Actions to Safeguard National Security and Eliminate Threats from Foreign Terrorist Organizations." He was the lead sponsor. Tom Tiffany, Lauren Boebert, Michael Guest, and Sheri Biggs signed on with him that day; Rich McCormick added his name the next.

To understand what that resolution was, you have to know what had happened in the three weeks before he wrote it — and what had been reported the day before.

What Happened on March 15, 2025

On March 15, 2025, the Trump administration invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 — a wartime law — and put people on planes.

238 Venezuelan migrants were flown to El Salvador's Terrorism Confinement Center, known as CECOT — more than 130 of them, a federal court would later find, under the Alien Enemies Act.

They did not get hearings first.

What CBS Found on April 6

Three weeks later, CBS News obtained the internal government list of who was on those planes and cross-checked it against domestic and international court filings, news reports, and arrest records.

The 60 Minutes report aired April 6, 2025. Its central finding:

"But we could not find criminal records for 75% of the Venezuelans — 179 men — now sitting in prison."

Of the at least 22% who did have records, CBS reported, "the vast majority are for non-violent offenses like theft, shoplifting and trespassing." About a dozen faced accusations of murder, rape, assault, or kidnapping.

About a dozen, out of 238.

By then, the administration had also already admitted, in a court filing on March 31, that it had deported Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia to El Salvador through what it called an "administrative error." An immigration judge had granted him protection from removal to El Salvador in October 2019; his lawyers said he had complied with that status by checking in with ICE yearly and had "neither been convicted nor charged with any crime." ICE sent him anyway, and he ended up in CECOT.

That is where things stood on the evening of Sunday, April 6, 2025.

What Crank Wrote on April 7

The next day, Crank introduced his resolution. Its text recites the flights approvingly — "on March 16, 2025, El Salvador President Nayib Bukele received these two flights and immediately transferred the SDGTs into El Salvador's Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) for detention" — and then resolves that the House:

"(1) supports the President's Action to remove foreign terrorists under the Alien Enemies Act… (2) affirms that, as Commander in Chief, the President has executive authority to detain, deport, or restrict non-citizens from a Foreign Terrorist Organization; and (3) endorses the complete elimination of these organizations from the United States…"

There is no hedge anywhere in it. No line about making sure the right people were on the planes. No mention of Abrego Garcia. No acknowledgment that the government's own list, as reviewed by CBS the previous night, showed three out of four of these men with nothing on their record.

The resolution simply describes every person on those flights as a foreign terrorist and asks the House to say so too.

Then a Federal Court Ruled

On June 4, 2025, Chief Judge James Boasberg of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled on the removals Crank's resolution had endorsed two months earlier.

He found that the more than 130 men were "unlawfully removed to CECOT before they had received constitutionally adequate notice" of the reason for their removal, and without "any meaningful opportunity to actually seek habeas relief." He ordered the administration to give them access to habeas corpus and to propose a process for it within a week.

On September 2, 2025, a Fifth Circuit panel went further. In a 2–1 ruling, it blocked the use of the Alien Enemies Act for these deportations, concluding that "the findings do not support that an invasion or a predatory incursion has occurred." A country's "encouraging its residents and citizens to enter this country illegally," the majority wrote, "is not the modern-day equivalent of sending an armed, organized force to occupy, to disrupt, or to otherwise harm the United States."

That panel opinion no longer stands. On September 30, 2025 the full Fifth Circuit agreed to rehear the case, and its order says so in one line: "the panel opinion in this case dated September 2, 2025, is VACATED." What has held the whole time is the Supreme Court's own order of May 16, 2025, which enjoins the government "from removing the named plaintiffs or putative class members in this action under the AEA pending order by the Fifth Circuit."

Crank's resolution asserted the President had the authority to do all of it. One federal judge held the removals it endorsed were unlawful, and a Fifth Circuit panel held the Act had been invoked improperly in the first place.

The Part Congress Was Supposed to Play

Here's what makes this more than a bad take on immigration.

The Alien Enemies Act is a wartime statute. It was written in 1798 for use against nationals of a country the United States is at war with, or that has launched an invasion or predatory incursion. Congress declares war. Congress wrote that law and set its limits.

When a president stretches a wartime power to cover peacetime immigration enforcement, the constitutional check is supposed to come from Congress — the branch that owns the war power in the first place.

Crank's response, as a member of that branch, was to write a resolution affirming that the President had the authority anyway.

That's not oversight. It's a permission slip. And he wrote it as a freshman, in his first four months in office, about a program whose own paperwork had been publicly discredited the day before.

Due Process Isn't a Technicality

The thing Boasberg found missing — notice, and a chance to be heard — is the entire machinery that separates "we deported a gang member" from "we deported a man with a tattoo."

That machinery is what caught Abrego Garcia's protected status in 2019. Skipping it is what sent him to CECOT in 2025.

Nobody has to sympathize with Tren de Aragua to see the problem. A hearing is how you find out who somebody actually is. When 179 of 238 men have no findable criminal record, the hearing wasn't a formality that got skipped — it was the only step that would have caught the error, and it got skipped on purpose.

Crank represents Colorado Springs, a military town. Every service member in his district took an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Due process is in that document. Twice.

He Doesn't Take These Questions in Person

If you live in Colorado's 5th District and want to ask Crank about H. Res. 295, good luck.

In March 2025 — the same month as the flights — Crank moved his first town hall online rather than face constituents in a room, and said of the people asking for an in-person event: "Why do they want to have an in-person town hall meeting?" — adding, "So they can stand there and wave a cane in my face like Al Green did last night and steal the show? I'm not interested in doing that."

Later that month, about 200 people filled a labor hall in Colorado Springs for a town hall organized by the local Indivisible chapter, the El Paso County Democrats, the Progressive Veterans and the local labor council. Crank was invited and didn't appear, so they put a cardboard cutout of him at the front of the room instead.

The cutout can't answer for the resolution either. But at least it never signed one.

Sources

Cecilia Vega, CBS News / 60 Minutes, "U.S. sent 238 migrants to Salvadoran mega-prison; documents indicate most have no apparent criminal records" (April 6, 2025), and the text of H. Res. 295 (April 7, 2025). Photo: Getty Images via CBS News.