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Axios:

It's the showdown that was always going to happen between the two branches of government," a senior White House official said. "And it seemed that this was pretty clean. You have Venezuelan gang members ... These are bad guys, as the president would say."

The overlooked problem is: saying it, doesn’t make it so.

How it happened: White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller "orchestrated" the process in the West Wing in tandem with Homeland Security Secretary Kristy Noem. Few outside their teams knew what was happening.

They didn't actually set out to defy a court order. "We wanted them on the ground first, before a judge could get the case, but this is how it worked out," said the official.

Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem are neither prosecutors nor judges. They have no authority to designate 1 person, much less 250, jaywalkers, much less terrorists. Who are these people?  What are the allegations against them? These are the most fundamental questions of a criminal court, and the basis for habeas corpus, a concept in Anglo-American jurisprudence that dates back to the fields of Runnymeade. These persons were entitled to face their accusers and present their defenses. We, the people, by whose authority Trump U.S. President and Miller and Noem have government jobs at all, don’t even know if there were 250 persons actually taken to El Salvador, much less who they are or what they allegedly did.

Between the lines: Officially, the Trump White House is not denying it ignored the judge's order, and instead wants to shift the argument to whether it was right to expel alleged members of Tren de Aragua.

Again, the first question is: were they members of Tren de Aragua? How do we know? Because some anonymous source said so to Axios?

This can’t be one they win at the Supreme Court. There’s a lot more at stake here than the reach of the AEA. Even Axios gets that:

It's unclear how many of the roughly 250 Venezuelans were deported under the Alien Enemies Act and how many were kicked out of the U.S. due to other immigration laws.

It's also not clear whether all of them were actually gang members.

This is the issue that needs to go to the Supreme Court.

UPDATE: Now the story is 261 persons were sent to El Salvador. But how do we know that number is accurate? We don’t even know who these people are. And by now I wouldn’t believe the Administration if they told us.