The Trump administration claims it has vast power to declare people in the U.S. terrorists and send them to a foreign prison — without hearings or evidence.

The Trump administration is building a case in court for its ability to send people in the United States to an overseas detention camp — and then refuse to bring them home even if they’re innocent.

In a new court filing Tuesday night, the administration referred to a group of Venezuelan migrants and asylum seekers it moved from the U.S. to an infamous Salvadoran prison — a gay makeup artist and a professional soccer player reportedly among them — as not only enemy combatants but also terrorists, supposedly subject to presidential powers that U.S. judges cannot review at all once they are outside of the country.

“The President doubtlessly acts within his constitutional prerogative by declining to transport foreign terrorists into the country,” administration lawyers wrote, explaining why they assert they did not violate a judge’s order to turn around planes carrying the migrants in question and bring them back to the United States.

“The President’s ultimate direction of the flights at issue here—especially once they had departed from U.S. airspace—implicated military matters, national security, and foreign affairs outside of our Nation’s borders,” government lawyers added later. “As such, it was beyond the courts’ authority to adjudicate.”

Once the planes were outside of the United States, the government argued, “the Constitution itself provided sufficient authority to act, and any dispute over the President’s extraterritorial exercise of that authority would present a non-reviewable political question.”

To some legal observers, it was a shocking assertion of presidential power.

“This argument suggests the existence of some kind of foreign policy loophole whereby the Executive could disregard the law to bring anyone accused of a national security threat outside of US territory, at which point he, as President, could do whatever he wants to them on national security ground,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, calling the government’s argument “a WILD claim.”

The Venezuelan migrants sent to El Salvador’s brutal supermax prison known as CECOT were claimed by Donald Trump’s administration to be members of a gang called Tren de Aragua — despite ample evidence, in some cases, to the contrary.

For example, at least one man had already successfully passed the extensive refugee screening process, only to be deemed a gang member by an immigration agent at an airport due to his tattoos, The Miami Herald reported. Several others were exercising their legal right to pursue asylum in the United States.

Now, lawyers and family members are unsure of the fate of the men sent to CECOT, which is known for its brutality and inhumane conditions — or even if they’ll ever see them again.

The Trump administration has officially designated Tren de Aragua and other gangs as terrorist organizations. And earlier this month, Trump said that Venezuelan officials and gang members were actually both members of a “hybrid criminal state that is perpetrating an invasion of and predatory incursion into the United States.” That, Trump argued, meant he could treat the supposed gang members as enemy combatants by invoking the Alien Enemies Act.

And whereas past invocations of the Alien Enemies Act have included opportunities for people to dispute their classification as enemy combatants, Venezuelan migrants who the U.S. government expelled were not given that opportunity before their planes touched down in El Salvador.

“Nazis got better treatment under the Alien Enemy Act than what has happened here. … They had hearing boards before people were removed,” Judge Patricia Millett, of the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, said at a hearing Monday. “Here, there’s nothing about hearing boards or regulations and nothing was adopted by agency officials who were administering this. People weren’t given notice [and] weren’t told where they were going.”

Even setting aside the Alien Enemies Act proclamation, which declared that supposed members of Tren de Aragua were actually part of an invading army, “the President has ample independent authority under Article II [of the U.S. Constitution] to decline to bring foreign terrorists into the United States, including by returning to the United States foreign terrorists who were previously within the United States,” the Justice Department argued in its filing Tuesday night.

Taken together, the Trump administration is arguing for a blank check to remove anyone they deem to be a gang member outside of the country without a hearing, send them to an infamous forced labor prison and then refuse to bring them back to the United States even as evidence emerges of their innocence.