The big deportation case wending its way to the Supreme Court will now have a different name.

What exactly are the due process rights of Venezuelan aliens who’ve been designated as “alien enemies” under President Trump’s proclamation pursuant, the administration maintains, to the 1798 Alien Enemy Act (AEA). Does the government have to give them an explanation, in their native Spanish as well as in English, that the courts have held they have a right to challenge their designation in a habeas corpus petition? Or will a curt English-only admonition that says they will be deported within 24 hours — leaving them to try to figure out what to do, find a lawyer, etc. — suffice? And what is the substance of their challenge? Is it just whether they are members of Tren de Aragua, or may they further claim that, even if they may be TdA members, the president has not properly invoked the AEA because there is no declared war, TdA is not a foreign power, and TdA has neither invaded nor carried out a predatory invasion of the United States?

That’s the crux of the matter, and until the courts grapple with it, the controversy will rage.

But while these central questions have not been decided, at least we now know what to call the case.

The cases brought by the aliens have been proceeding under pseudonyms formed from their initials — yesterday, for example, I referred to the Supreme Court’s April 7 decision, Trump v. J.G.G. (holding that the aliens have a right to challenge their AEA designation habeas corpus).

The names of the lead alien plaintiffs in the latest case to make its way up the chain — the case I wrote about over the weekend, here and here — is conveyed by the initials A.A.R.P. Naturally, this has caused apoplexy at one of the nation’s best known nonprofit advocacy groups. So well known is AARP by this acronym that it was kept even though the organization abandoned its original name, the American Association of Retired Persons, in 1999. (The problem was the word retired; about a third of AARP members were still working. Since American Association of Persons wouldn’t tell us much about what the organization does, it stuck with AARP.)

At his invaluable legal site, the Volokh Conspiracy (at Reason), Eugene Volokh posts that the AARP intervened in A.A.R.P. v. Trump with a motion to change the caption of the case and tweak one plaintiff’s initials. No one objected, so the case will now be captioned under the initials of the other lead plaintiff, W.M.M. v. Trump, and petitioner A.A.R.P. will now be known as “A.R.P.”

What a momentous decision this is! Judge James Wesley Hendrix, the Trump appointee presiding over the matter in the federal district court in the Northern District of Texas, took pains to explain that the civil procedure rules allow for intervention by a third party only when that party has an interest in the case: a claim on the property involved, or a claim or defense that hinges on a question of law being litigated in the case. AARP had no such interest — in fact, it wants everyone to know that it “takes absolutely no position regarding the subject matter of this litigation” and merely wanted to “avoid confusion” — the confusion of having its name forever linked to a precedent (eventually, a Supreme Court precedent) about an international criminal organization that the Trump administration alleges is not just a foreign terrorist organization but a veritable wartime enemy of the United States.

Try lobbying against Medicare cuts with that hanging around your neck!

Since no one in the case had a problem with it, Judge Hendrix went with the flow. So now, it’s W.M.M. v. Trump. We can heave a sigh of relief because, as Volokh quips, “the AARP is not in danger of being deported as a Tren de Aragua member”!

I have a feeling it may be the last agreement between the parties that we see.