#J.G.G. v. Trump

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Kelby Vera at HuffPost:

Elon Musk called one Republican’s plan to impeach a judge who blocked President Donald Trump’s deportation efforts “necessary” in a Sunday morning post on X. After Texas congressman Brandon Gill (R) announced he would be filing articles of impeachment against U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, the billionaire chimed in with a self-righteous one-word declaration. “Necessary,” Musk posted to his social media platform. Conservatives immediately began accusing Boasberg of overreach after he issued a temporary restraining order blocking Trump’s Saturday night decision to invoke an 18th century wartime law known as the Alien Enemies Act to fast-track the deportations of five Venezuelan nationals accused of gang affiliations. The Alien Enemies Act, which gives the president sweeping authority to expedite deportations on national security grounds, had only been used three times prior.

Elon Musk is an anti-American sociopath for even suggesting that Judge Boasberg be impeached over his ruling to block Trump’s flagrant misuse of the Alien Enemies Act.

[mariacallous]

We are witnessing a constitutional system on the brink. The crisis started on Saturday, when James E. Boasberg, the chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, issued an order that could hardly have been clearer: he told the Trump Administration to halt the imminent deportation of immigrants alleged to be Venezuelan gang members.

“You shall inform your clients of this immediately, and that any plane containing these folks that is going to take off or is in the air needs to be returned to the United States—but those people need to be returned to the United States,” Boasberg instructed the Justice Department lawyer Drew Ensign over Zoom, a hearing called so hurriedly that the judge, away for the weekend without having packed his robes, apologized at the start for his informal dress.

“However that’s accomplished, whether turning around a plane or not embarking anyone on the plane . . . I leave to you,” Boasberg said. “But this is something that you need to make sure is complied with immediately.”

Federal judges are accustomed to being obeyed, but there is a new Administration in town, and it is dangerously and deliberately testing the limits of judicial power. As Boasberg was speaking, the planes were in the air; authorities had them continue on to El Salvador, which had agreed to jail the Venezuelans for a reported six million dollars.

“Oopsie . . . Too late,” the Salvadoran President, Nayib Bukele, posted on X the next morning, along with a laughing-tears emoji and a screenshot of a New York Post story about Boasberg’s order. Bukele was quickly retweeted by, among other Administration officials, Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

President Donald Trump on Tuesday demanded the judge’s impeachment, calling him “a Radical Left Lunatic.” At which point the Chief Justice of the United States, John Roberts, weighed in. “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision,” Roberts wrote in a rare public statement. “The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.”

There’s been talk for weeks now of an impending constitutional crisis. The term is imprecise, but there’s broad agreement that it covers the spectacle of a President outright refusing to comply with a court order. And here we are—although the Administration asserts otherwise. Now comes an uncomfortable question: Are courts—lacking, as Alexander Hamilton observed, “influence over either the sword or the purse”—capable of doing anything much in response?

J.G.G. v. Donald J. Trump, the case before Boasberg, places the questions of judicial authority front and center. It also goes to the question of fundamental fairness. At issue is whether the government, invoking wartime powers at a moment when the country is not at war, can, on authorities’ bare assertion, with no judicial review, take individuals who have been convicted of no crime and deport them to serve hard time in the prisons of another country. The case, even before the possibility of defying court orders arose, encapsulated some of the most dangerous legal tendencies of the Trump Administration: a hyper-aggressive conception of Presidential power combined with an eagerness to stretch statutory language beyond any reasonable bounds.

Trump has been threatening for months to use the Alien Enemies Act, of 1798, to expel Venezuelans who the Administration says belong to the Tren de Aragua gang, without the bother of going through legal proceedings. The law has been invoked just three times—during the War of 1812 and the First and Second World Wars—and you don’t have to be a diehard textualist to understand that it doesn’t apply in the current circumstances: it applies only when “there is a declared war between the United States and any foreign nation” or “any invasion or predatory incursion is perpetrated,” again, “by any foreign nation.”

Given how far afield Trump’s actions stray from the law, it was no surprise that Boasberg was willing to grant a temporary restraining order Saturday to keep the status quo in place. What was shocking was the Trump Administration’s willingness to so flagrantly violate his order. The Georgetown University law professor Marty Lederman, a Justice Department official during Democratic Administrations, wrote that he couldn’t recall “any historical precedent where executive branch officials have embarked on such an audacious action to anticipatorily stymie the proper functioning of a federal court—let alone to do so in the midst of a judicial hearing.”

So Boasberg—this time in robes—summoned the lawyers to an emergency hearing on Monday, to find out what had happened. What ensued was one of the most extraordinary exchanges I’ve witnessed in years of covering the courts. Boasberg, displaying remarkable forbearance, asked basic, seemingly innocuous questions, only to be met with stonewalling from the Justice Department.

“How many planes departed the United States at any point on Saturday carrying any people being deported solely on the basis of the proclamation?” Boasberg asked.

“Those are operational issues, and I am not at liberty to provide or authorized to provide any information on how many flights left,” Deputy Associate Attorney General Abhishek Kambli responded. (The answer, from reporters tracking the flights, appears to be three.) “The information that I am authorized to provide is that no planes took off from the United States after the written order came through.”

Boasberg was incredulous that the department was refusing to provide the information—even to Boasberg himself, in private. “Why are you showing up today and not having answers to why you can’t even disclose it?” he asked. “Maybe those answers are classified. . . . Maybe those answers are not classified, but they shouldn’t be for the public. Fine also. But you are telling me . . . you can’t even tell me which of those applies?”

That was just the start. Kambli contended that the Administration hadn’t violated Boasberg’s oral instructions, because it was only bound by the written order issued shortly afterward, which did not specify that planes had to be turned around.

No self-respecting judge would stand for that. When the jury returns a guilty verdict and the judge instructs the marshals to take the defendant into custody, the marshals don’t tell him or her to put it in writing. The notion that the Justice Department didn’t have to comply with what Boasberg said was, as Boasberg put it, “a heck of a stretch.”

Kambli also argued that Boasberg’s authority over the planes disappeared once they left U.S. airspace—a particularly cynical position because, as Boasberg tartly noted, the Administration knew, when it chose to have the planes take off, that Boasberg had scheduled a hearing at the exact same time to determine the fate of the detainees onboard.

Boasberg ordered the Justice Department to provide more explanation for why it wouldn’t explain itself. “I will memorialize this in a written order, since apparently my oral orders don’t seem to carry much weight,” he noted. When, on Tuesday, the department balked again at providing such “sensitive information” while Boasberg’s order to halt the deportations is on appeal, Boasberg gave it another twenty-four hours to come up with answers, to be submitted under seal and directly to him.

Just before its latest refusal, the Justice Department made an extraordinary request: that the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit not only reverse Boasberg’s order but remove him from the case, because, it said, he had engaged in “highly unusual and improper procedures.” (I can confidently predict that this is not going to happen.)

The larger question of what powers Boasberg may have here is knotty, especially now that the detainees are imprisoned in a foreign country. “We will ask the judge to order the government to get these individuals back,” Lee Gelernt, a lawyer for the A.C.L.U. and the lead attorney on the case, said after the hearing. “There’s a very serious question about whether a federal judge can ever order a foreign government to do something, and the answer is generally no, but here I think we’re in a very different situation.” El Salvador, he said, is acting less like a foreign sovereign than like “a private prison holding these individuals, and it appears that the U.S. is paying for it.” (The A.C.L.U.’s co-counsel in the case is the public-interest group Democracy Forward, where my daughter is a lawyer.)

But the Administration is clearly spoiling for a fight. (It picked an unlikely target. Boasberg, a Yale Law School housemate of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s, is a former homicide prosecutor and so well respected as a judge that he was tapped by the Chief Justice to serve on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.) “We’re not stopping,” Thomas Homan, Trump’s border czar, proclaimed ahead of Monday’s hearing. “I don’t care what the judges think.” Stephen Miller, a deputy White House chief of staff, tweeted at day’s end, “The President’s cabinet must be able to spend all their energies focused solely on delivering . . . for Americans—not spending untold hours trying to answer the insane edicts of radical rogue judges usurping core Article II powers. These judges are bulldozing our democracy.”

The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, appeared on Fox News on Monday evening to underscore the supposed dangers of Boasberg’s intervention: “If we live in a country where the will of the American people is subverted by a single judge in a single court, we no longer live in a democracy.” Let me fix that for her. If we live in a country where judges’ orders can be ignored by an Administration bent on amassing unchecked power, we no longer live in a democracy.

[fnatweety]

KrisAnne Hall, constitutional attorney on X @krisannehall

BREAKING:

Supreme Court vacates a nationwide TRO halting deportations under the Alien Enemies Act—not because due process doesn't apply, but because lower courts lack the authority to issue sweeping national orders.

📜 SCOTUS in Trump v. J.G.G. (2025)

⚖️ The ruling reinforces:

✔️ Due process is required.

❌ But judicial power must stay within constitutional bounds—district courts can’t govern nationwide.

👉 Beware the narrative framing this as a battle of liberty vs. executive power.

This is an opinion enforcing the limited power of lower courts, not expanding executive reach.

Once again Barrett sides with the liberal justices. When will the influencers stop referring to her as a "conservative?"

SeparationOfPowers JudicialLimits FederalCourts ConLaw

[collapsedsquid]

I’ve already written in some detail about the Alien Enemy Act and the litigation before Chief Judge Boasberg, and will assume some familiarity with the background. As relevant here, Boasberg had entered two temporary restraining orders: one to bar the government from using the Alien Enemy Act to remove five named plaintiffs; and a second to prevent the government from using the Act against anyone in the same broad class as the plaintiffs while its validity was litigated. Critically, Boasberg predicated his relief on the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), not the federal habeas corpus statute (which would arguably have required those individuals in the United States to file in the district in which they’re confined—i.e., the Southern District of Texas). The government asked the D.C. Circuit to stay (or vacate) the TROs, and a divided panel declined—with even Judge Henderson in the majority. But Monday night, a 5-4 majority of the Supreme Court, with Justice Barrett joining the Democratic appointees in dissent, agreed to do so. The short per curiam opinion effectively says two things: First, the Court held that individuals detained and facing removal under the Alien Enemy Act are, contra the Trump administration, absolutely entitled to due process before they are removed, including meaningful judicial review. That should’ve been obvious, but it’s nice having the Supreme Court unanimously reaffirm that point. Indeed, the Court expressly held that “AEA detainees must receive notice after the date of this order that they are subject to removal under the Act. The notice must be afforded within a reasonable time and in such a manner as will allow them to actually seek habeas relief in the proper venue before such removal occurs.” This is actually good. But second, the Court also held that such judicial review must come through habeas petitions—not through the APA. In other words, the five individual plaintiffs in J.G.G. need to bring their suit as a habeas petition—and, given where they’re detained, not in the D.C. federal district court. This holding was, suffice it to say, not exactly obvious. Indeed, there are some compelling arguments that, although habeas is a vehicle through which to challenge the government’s use of the Alien Enemy Act, it’s not (and never has been) the exclusive vehicle for doing so. But here we are.

Because this decision is all about the rights to habeas it's difficult even with this for to me to understand how they can challenge their confinement and how easy it is to ship them off without anyone reviewing it.

[protoslacker]

This isn’t any old case; it’s the case in which the government has come the closest to outright defiance of a court order (something Chief Judge Boasberg is still in the middle of adjudicating). And it’s the case that led President Trump to call for the impeachment of a sitting federal judge for doing nothing other than rule against him (a statement that led to a surprisingly quick and aggressive rebuttal from Chief Justice Roberts). Not two weeks later, here’s Roberts providing the decisive vote to hold that, in fact, the case shouldn’t have been before that judge (or that court) in the first place, without even a hint that any of the government’s (profoundly disturbing) behavior in this case warrants any reproach. As Justice Sotomayor concludes her dissent, “The Government’s conduct in this litigation poses an extraordinary threat to the rule of law. That a majority of this Court now rewards the Government for its behavior with discretionary equitable relief is indefensible. We, as a Nation and a court of law, should be better than this.”

Steve Vladeck in One First. 140. The Disturbing Myopia of Trump v. J.G.G.

In normal times, it might be possible to defend the Supreme Court's 5-4 ruling on Monday vacating a pair of temporary restraining orders in the Alien Enemy Act case. But these aren't normal times.

[theknightlywolfe]

"Not long after Trump issued his proclamation, on the same Saturday evening, federal Judge James Boasberg issued two orders that temporarily halted it. The first is a temporary restraining order seeking to prevent any deportations from taking place under Trump’s proclamation until Boasberg has time to hold a full hearing and determine how to proceed in this case.

The second order certifies this case, known as J.G.G. v. Trump, as a class action lawsuit concerning “all noncitizens in U.S. custody” who are subject to Trump’s Saturday proclamation. That order forbids the government from “removing members of such class (not otherwise subject to removal) pursuant to the Proclamation for 14 days or until further Order of the Court.”

Which brings us to the potential constitutional crisis. At a Saturday hearing on this case, lawyers for the plaintiffs told Boasberg that two planes containing Venezuelans who were deported under the proclamation were “in the air.” During that hearing, Boasberg ordered that “those people need to be returned to the United States.” He also acknowledged, however, that once the planes land and their occupants deplane, he no longer has jurisdiction to order their return.

...

In a document filed Monday morning, the plaintiffs’ attorneys cite publicly available flight data as well as news reports, which suggest that the Trump administration allowed these planes to land and discharge their passengers after Boasberg issued his order. If that is true, then the Trump administration defied the order and can potentially be held in contempt of court.

Meanwhile, in a second case known as Chehab v. Noem, the federal government may have removed Dr. Rasha Alawieh, a Lebanese national and professor at Brown University’s medical school, in violation of a court order requiring the government to give the court 48 hours notice before she is removed. The facts in this case are rapidly evolving, however, and two of her lawyers recently withdrew from the case."

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Sara Boboltz at HuffPost:

President Donald Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, suggested in a Monday Fox News appearance that the nation’s justice system would not keep the Trump administration from fulfilling its mission to deport any immigrants it deems dangerous. “We’re not stopping. I don’t care what the judges think. I don’t care what the left thinks. We’re coming,” Homan told “Fox & Friends” host Lawrence B. Jones on Monday. “Lawrence, they’re not going to stop us,” he said. “I wake up every morning loving my job because I work for the greatest president in the history of my life.” His comments come amid growing aggression in the Trump administration toward the Constitution’s foundational separation of power structures across the federal government. In recent days, Trump officials have found themselves in hot water with multiple federal judges, as noted by Jones.

Fascist bastard “border czar” Thomas Homan went on Fox and Friends Monday morning told the world “We’re not stopping. I don’t care what the judges think. I don’t care what the left thinks. We’re coming” in response to the lawless mass deportation scheme by Tyrant 47 with his bogus Alien Enemies Act activation being halted by the courts and the Trump Regime’s defiance of such rulings.

See Also:

MMFA: Border czar Tom Homan on Fox: “I don't care what the judges think. I don't care what the left thinks. We're coming.”

From the 03.17.2025 edition of FNC's Fox and Friends:

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Chris Geidner at Law Dork:

A little before 7:00 p.m. Saturday, a federal judge issued an order temporarily stopping deportations set in motion by President Donald Trump hours earlier when he invoked a law last used to justify Japanese internment camps. With planes that had people on board being deported leaving immediately following Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, Chief Judge James Boasberg said, "I am required to act immediately." Boasberg issued a classwide, nationwide temporary restraining order at the hearing, blocking removal of any noncitizens in U.S. custody who are subject to Trump’s order for the next 14 days. The fight over the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 entered the federal courts earlier Saturday, after Trump suggested — and reporting followed — that he was planning to invoke the law to deport immigrants quickly and with no process. At 9:40 a.m. Saturday, citing the “exigent circumstances,” Boasberg of the federal district court in D.C. issued a temporary restraining order blocking the Trump administration from deporting five “Venezuelan men in immigration custody” for the next 14 days. By mid-afternoon, Trump had issued an order invoking the act as to Tren de Aragua (TdA), a Venezuelan gang, and its members for only the fourth time in the nation’s history — and the first time while the nation was not in war. The ACLU and Democracy Forward had filed the case early Saturday, and — while the initial TRO seemed narrow — the case is focused on what is expected to be one of the Trump administration’s most aggressive and lawless efforts yet to speed deportations. In addition to the TRO and before Trump had announced the order, Boasberg scheduled a hearing for 5 p.m. Saturday to consider the plaintiff’s request to certify this as a class-action lawsuit, a move to protect all people potentially covered by the administration’s expected action. As CNN reported, “The Trump administration is expected to invoke a sweeping wartime authority to speed up the president’s mass deportation pledge in the coming days, according to four sources familiar with the discussions. The little-known 18th-century law, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, gives the president tremendous authority to target and remove undocumented immigrants, though legal experts have argued it would face an uphill battle in court.” Trump announced that he had done so shortly before the 5 p.m. hearing.

Anti-American megalomaniac Donald Trump’s lawless and illegal invocation of the rarely used Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport 5 Venezuelan men alleged to be Tren de Aragua gang members with the purpose of speeding up mass deportations without due process during peacetime was blocked by a judge in J.G.G. v. Trump.

See Also:

AP, via HuffPost: Trump Invokes 18th Century Law To Declare Invasion By Gangs And Speed Deportations

The Parnas Perspective: BREAKING: Federal Judge Blocks Trump's Alien Enemies Act Proclamation

The Guardian: Trump invokes 18th-century wartime act to deport five Venezuelans

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Matt Shuham at HuffPost:

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.

[...] 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. [...]

Trump Administration Uses Secrecy To Cover Its Tracks

At several points in the legal fight over the flights to El Salvador’s megaprison, the Trump administration has used secrecy to push back against legal accountability, including well before Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act last week. Starting in February, immigration agents began detaining Venezuelan asylum seekers who’d up to that point followed the legal process for pursuing asylum in the United States. In multiple cases, the detentions were the result of people’s tattoos, Talking Points Memo reported Tuesday, citing interviews and lawyers’ declarations in court filings. “Over the next month and a half,” the outlet reported, “detainees were progressively moved across the country towards the South Texas airfield from which the removal flights departed.” The secrecy of the operation all but ensured that lawyers for the affected migrants would not be able to challenge in court the government’s labeling of their clients as invading soldiers.

Satan-possessed traitor Donald Trump and his crooked un-American administration advances delusional claim that “terrorists” alleged to be TdA-affiliated can be sent to CECOT concentration camp in El Salvador under bogus Alien Enemies Act pretenses.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Allison Gill at Mueller, She Wrote:

There’s a lot going on in the case of detainees being flown to El Salvador using Trump’s Alien Enemies Act (AEA) proclamation. Ten days ago, after hearing that Trump had invoked the AEA, five Venezuelans being deported without due process asked for an emergency hearing for a temporary restraining order (TRO). Judge Boasberg caught the case and came in for an emergency hearing because planes were already taking off with deportees subject to the invocation of the Alien Enemies Act. During that hearing, the judge asked Trump’s DoJ about the planes, and they responded that they didn’t have any information. With that, Judge Boasberg adjourned the court for 38 minutes to give the DoJ time to get the flight details. When DoJ returned, they still didn’t have any information on the flights. By the end of the hearing, Judge Boasberg expanded the “class” of plaintiffs from the five Venezuelans represented by the ACLU, to ALL people being deported under the proclamation (Venezuelan members of Tren de Aragua (TdA) being deported under the Alien Enemies Act.) After expanding the class, the judge ordered all planes to return to the United States. Within hours, it became clear that the Trump administration had defied Boasberg’s order. Several propaganda videos were released on social media and shared by right wing influencers. Some photos shared by Trump and Rubio, showed tail numbers on planes that could be easily tracked using public flight trackers. Despite this information being easily available to the public, the Trump administration has been refusing to give the information to the judge in his quest to determine whether the Trump administration had violated his court order. [...] They try to justify it using affidavits signed by Marco Rubio, Pam Bondi, and Kristi Noem, who attempt to justify the state secrets privilege by saying that this case hinges on sensitive negotiations with foreign countries (again, many of which were blasted out on Twitter by Bukele and Rubio themselves.)

The Trump Administration has invoked “state secrets privilege” in the J.G.G. v. Trump case that deals with the Alien Enemies Act.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Matt Shuham at HuffPost:

Justice Department lawyers representing the Trump administration were defiant in a federal court hearing Monday, declining to answer several of the judge’s questions and otherwise defending the administration’s conduct after immigration authorities appear to have violated the judge’s order. The hearing concerned U.S. District Judge James Boasberg’s verbal order Saturday that planes being used to deport people under the Alien Enemies Act, a rarely used wartime power, be immediately returned to the United States. The administration attorneys asserted they did not refuse to comply — even as they acknowledged ignoring a verbal order from the court. On Saturday, the administration allowed multiple planes to land in El Salvador — the president of which has promised to throw deportees into a notoriously brutal supermax prison — hours after Boasberg issued an order pausing the deportations. In court on Saturday, the judge said, “This is something that you need to make sure is complied with immediately.” At Monday’s hearing, administration lawyers said they didn’t consider the judge’s verbal order to be operative — and argued that a written, paragraph-long “minute order” later entered in the court docket superseded it. The minute order didn’t mention turning planes around. “That’s a heck of a stretch,” replied Boasberg, the chief judge in the federal district court in D.C., after a Justice Department lawyer confirmed that the administration believed it could disregard his verbal order. (Verbal orders are, in fact, judicial orders.) The Justice Department lawyers, Abhishek Kambli and August Flentje, also argued that Trump’s “inherent authority” regarding foreign policy and military decisions trumped the judge’s authority once the planes left the United States, even though Boasberg’s verbal order had addressed planes that were “in the air.” [...] “All I can say is that I’m authorized to say what we said in the public filing and to the extent that there’s anything more, that’s not relevant, because we do believe that we complied with the court order, which is that no flights took off from U.S. territories after the written order,” one of the Justice Department attorneys said. (Poor audio quality on the court’s phone line made it difficult to differentiate the two DOJ attorneys.) “That does not comply with my order,” Boasberg shot back, adding that his order was “broader than that. It’s not a question of ‘taking off’ from U.S. territory, as anyone who reads a transcript of the hearing knows.” He said the administration would have to provide a specific reason why it wanted to exclude information from court. Boasberg didn’t issue any rulings, but set a noon Tuesday deadline for the administration to lay out its position in writing, as well as provide various facts the Justice Department lawyers said Monday that they couldn’t.

Judge James Boasberg called out Trump Regime’s DOJ lawyers for making excuses for disobeying court orders regarding Alien Enemies Act declaration from 47.

See Also:

Thinking About... (Timothy Snyder): The evil at your door

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Jay Kuo at The Status Kuo:

Last week, we learned with growing horror of the summary rendition of hundreds of migrants to a prison in El Salvador. The Trump administration, without any supporting evidence, claimed all the migrants were hardened criminals and members of the Tren de Aragua gang of Venezuela. To briefly recap the madness and chaos, on March 14, the White House issued a proclamation under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 (yes, that’s the correct century) claiming that we were effectively at war with Venezuela and that this fiction somehow justified the summary deportations of suspected Venezuelan gang members. These migrant “invaders” were being sent not to Venezuela, however, but to a special, high security terrorist prison facility in El Salvador, a country we are now paying to house rendered migrants. (The legality of the highly questionable and ripe-for-abuse practice of “rendition,” which seeks to remove the clear protections of the U.S. courts and the Constitution from any impacted individuals, is itself in doubt. But we’ll get to that another time.) The next day, on March 15, the ACLU sued in federal court in D.C. to stop the planes filled with migrants from taking off. They succeeded in obtaining a temporary restraining order, issued from the bench by Judge James Boasberg, who even ordered any planes in the air to turn around. As we all know, the planes continued on. One even departed well after Judge Boasberg’s written order came down. This situation deepened the current constitutional crisis, as we witnessed the administration defy a direct court order. Since then, there have been some notable developments exposing the administration’s entire operation as a sham from the get-go. Reports on the ground of non-gang members being swept up in this nightmare are now circulating widely. And the administration and its spokespersons are looking increasingly unhinged—and lately entirely on their own as Trump himself backs off from the mess and begins to throw others under the bus.

Judge Boasberg appears ready to smack heads together

Judge Boasberg held a hearing on Friday, March 21, and it did not go well for the government. Per a summary by CBS reporter Scott MacFarlane, who attended the hearing live, the day began with the judge noting the “disrespectful language” in the Department of Justice’s filings, which was unlike anything he’d ever seen before. Not the way you want the day to start if you’re the government attorney. The judge then hammered the Justice Department’s lawyer about apparent defiance of his orders, before 1) getting him to admit that he’d understood the oral order to turn the planes around, and 2) backing him into a corner over whether he knew about the flights that had taken off during a recess in the hearing, which the judge had called expressly so that the government lawyer could obtain details about these very flights. “Are you saying no one told you about those flights?” Judge Boasberg asked. The DOJ lawyer responded with a dodge, saying he didn’t personally know of the flights. That’s right: He claimed because he didn’t witness the flights take off himself or talk to their captains, he had no personal knowledge, even if others told him they were about to take off. The rebuke from the judge was swift. “I often tell my clerks before they go out in the world to practice law,” he said, “the most treasured valued item… is reputation and credibility.” Judge Boasberg had lots of questions that remain unanswered. Why was the proclamation signed in secret? The lawyer didn’t know. Is that because the government knew there would be legal challenges? No response. Also, what happens if someone is not a gang member or even a Venezuelan? How do they challenge their removal? Judge Boasberg then made an important point that the press keeps missing. These migrants were already in custody. They weren’t seeking release from that custody, just non-removal under the Alien Enemies Act, which of course is a wartime law, and we aren’t at war with Venezuela. [...]

Public anger mounts over non-gang member renditions

Since the apparently illegal and obviously rushed renditions occurred, the media has dug into who was swept up in the operation. While the government continues to insist that it was only criminal gang members, the weight of evidence so far contradicts this. Take the case of Jerce Reyes Barrios, a Venezuelan soccer player. As Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute reported, Barrios applied for asylum legally in the U.S. in 2024 after escaping Venezuela, where he had been tortured by the Maduro regime for his anti-government activities. Barrios had committed no crimes, had no criminal record and no gang membership. But Barrios was labeled a gang member for allegedly having a gang tattoo. His lawyers insist that it is a Real Madrid tattoo, and that ICE got it wrong. Nevertheless, the U.S. put him in detention in the U.S. then rendered him to prison in El Salvador along with the other migrants. [...]

Trump is backpedaling and undermining his own proclamation

Apart from the judge’s scathing takedowns, the public backlash and the absurd posturing of administration officials, there’s another clear sign that the rendition is backfiring: Trump himself is trying to back away from it and claim no responsibility. [...] Trump often acts with feral instinct, and in his gut he knows that these renditions have now soured the public against those responsible for it. Like he has done many other times, he is now professing no knowledge of when it was signed or who was responsible. It’s a convenient dodge, but it’s not going to hold up either in a court of law or the court of public opinion. Trump is looking for someone to blame for this fiasco, and so someone is going to have to pretend they were the ones who overstepped. Overreach and abuse of power is par for the course for this administration, and no matter how many rounds of musical chairs they play, someone else will ultimately have to take the fall for this mess.

The Trump Regime’s anti-American renditions of migrants with alleged “gang ties” to El Salvador as a result of 47’s asinine Alien Enemies Act declaration is backfiring big time.

See Also:

Robert Reich: If Trump can disappear them, he can disappear you.

Adam Kinzinger: The Rule of Law vs. Trump’s War

Let's Address This (Qasim Rashid): Trump Goes Full Fascist In Rounding Up Americans

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Jennifer Bendery at HuffPost:

WASHINGTON — The White House on Wednesday accused a federal judge of being a “Democrat activist” after he issued an order temporarily blocking the Trump administration from deporting hundreds of Venezuelan migrants. “It’s very, very clear that this is an activist judge,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said of U.S. district judge James Boasberg. “Judge Boasberg is a Democrat activist,” Leavitt said. “He was appointed by Barack Obama. His wife has donated more than $10,000 to Democrats. And he has consistently shown his disdain for this president and his policies and it’s unacceptable.” Except Boasberg, whom President Donald Trump is mad at for halting his mass deportations, has ruled in favor of Trump lots of times before this case. He previously ordered the release of 15,000 documents on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email server when she was Trump’s presidential opponent in 2016. He dismissed a 2017 lawsuit aimed at forcing the IRS to release Trump’s tax returns, preventing his taxes from becoming public. Boasberg also limited the scope of memos the FBI had to release relating to former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, issued more lenient sentences for Jan. 6, 2021, defendants than what prosecutors were seeking, and limited grand jury material disclosure in Trump’s classified documents case. Beyond his past decisions that have benefited Trump, Boasberg has enjoyed strong support from Republicans for virtually his entire career. President George W. Bush first nominated him to the Superior Court of the District of Columbia in 2002, a judgeship he held for nine years.

Lying Spokesbarbie Karoline Leavitt pushed the delusional lie that James E. Boasberg is a “Democrat activist” just because he had the temerity to rule against the Orange Führer’s bogus declaration of the Alien Enemies Act.

Boasberg has ruled in favor of Trump on several occasions, which further dismantles the nonsensical “Democrat activist” canard spewed about him.

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Matt Shuham at HuffPost:

After days of defying a federal judge concerning the expulsion of hundreds of migrants to a brutal prison in El Salvador, the Trump administration told the judge Wednesday to be more “respectful.” In turn, the judge gave the administration 24 more hours to fulfill a demand for information related to the administration’s defiance of his previous orders. U.S. District Judge James Boasberg’s demands for information about flights carrying hundreds of migrants were actually “a picayune dispute over the micromanagement of immaterial factfinding” the Trump administration said in a new filing, which urged Boasberg to “stay,” or pause, his order for more information. In response to the administration’s hissy fit, the judge said the government’s ���grounds for such request at first blush are not persuasive,” but he nonetheless gave the administration 24 more hours to provide information he’s ordered about the expulsion flights, or otherwise to explain why it wanted to keep the information secret, setting a new deadline of noon Thursday. Three planes carrying migrants expelled by the United States landed in El Salvador on Saturday night, hours after Boasberg verbally ordered the administration to turn them around and told Justice Department lawyers in court to effectuate the order “immediately.” But the government didn’t do that. Instead, all three flights were allowed to land in El Salvador, where President Nayib Bukele published a video showing the migrants, who had been living in the United States, being manhandled and having their heads shaved by prison guards. Bukele has said the migrants will do at least a year of forced labor. He and members of the Trump administration later mocked the judge’s order.

In its filing Wednesday morning, the Trump administration asserted “the Court’s continued intrusions into the prerogatives of the Executive Branch, especially on a non-legal and factually irrelevant matter, should end.” The brief also claimed: “The Court has no basis to intrude into the conduct of foreign affairs by the Government, and a more deliberative and respectful approach is warranted.” That wasn’t all. Throughout the seven-page filing, the Trump administration railed against Boasberg, the chief judge for the Washington, D.C., district court, and said his request for supposedly “immaterial information” represented “grave usurpations” of the president’s power. The government again asserted that the case was “not even justiciable” — that is, that Boasberg had no right to even involve himself in Trump’s expulsion powers.

[...] White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller on Wednesday referred to various district court judges’ rulings as “lunacy” and “the gravest assault on democracy” that “must and will end.” And on Tuesday, Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, said “We’re not stopping. I don’t care what the judges think.” After Trump and others called for Boasberg’s impeachment, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts issued a rare two-sentence rebuke. [...] Wednesday’s Trump administration filing repeatedly referred to the judge’s verbal order instead as a “comment,” which it said represented a “complete misunderstanding” of the situation. The government has not provided any detailed information on the expelled migrants — other than asserting they are gang members — and the migrants were given no due process because the expulsions were largely carried out under the Alien Enemies Act, a centuries-old law that previously has only been used three times during declared wars. Multiple family members and lawyers say they know of people with no gang affiliation who were nonetheless sent to the Salvadoran prison. The Trump administration contends that the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua is actually a terrorist group and a part of the Venezuelan “hybrid criminal state that is perpetrating an invasion of and predatory incursion into the United States.”

Cry more, Trump Administration! 🐓🍭

See Also:

HuffPost: What Happens When The Trump Administration Disobeys The Courts

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Emily Singer at Daily Kos:

President Donald Trump on Tuesday said a federal judge who attempted to block his administration from deporting hundreds of immigrants to an El Salvadoran gulag should be impeached and removed. U.S. District Judge James Boasberg halted Trump's attempt to deport without due process the alleged Venezuelan immigrants he accused of being members of a violent gang. Trump already ignored Boasberg's order to turn around the planes, which were carrying the alleged immigrants to El Salvador. But now he wants Boasberg removed altogether, saying in a deranged Truth Social post that Boasberg is a "Radical Left Lunatic of a Judge, a troublemaker and agitator who was sadly appointed by Barack Hussein Obama." "He didn’t WIN the popular VOTE (by a lot!), he didn’t WIN ALL SEVEN SWING STATES, he didn’t WIN 2,750 to 525 Counties, HE DIDN’T WIN ANYTHING!" Trump wrote in his insane and lie-filled screed. "I WON FOR MANY REASONS, IN AN OVERWHELMING MANDATE, BUT FIGHTING ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION MAY HAVE BEEN THE NUMBER ONE REASON FOR THIS HISTORIC VICTORY. I’m just doing what the VOTERS wanted me to do. This judge, like many of the Crooked Judges’ I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED!!! WE DON’T WANT VICIOUS, VIOLENT, AND DEMENTED CRIMINALS, MANY OF THEM DERANGED MURDERERS, IN OUR COUNTRY. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!" Multiple House Republicans want to impeach judges who have ruled against Trump and his administration's other illegal actions, including those largely conducted through the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. "I’m drafting articles of impeachment for US District Judge Paul Engelmayer. Partisan judges abusing their positions is a threat to democracy," Republican Rep. Eli Crane of Arizona said in a post on X in February, after the judge blocked DOGE staffers from accessing Treasury Department data. Shortly after that post, Crane introduced articles of impeachment against Engelmayer, accusing him of violating his oath and abusing his judicial powers. And freshman Republican Rep. Brandon Gill of Texas said this past Saturday he was introducing articles of impeachment against Boasberg. Co-President Elon Musk replied to Gill’s post, writing in an X post that Boasberg’s impeachment is “necessary.” But this is the first time Trump has publicly blessed Republican efforts to try to remove judges who are simply interpreting and applying the laws. [...]

Even the right-wing New York Post editorial board has told Republicans to cut it out with their thirst for ousting federal judges. “Sorry, Elon: Even deporting illegal gangbangers must heed the rule of law,” the editorial board wrote on Sunday. It went on to say that it is “just plain silly for Musk to tweet ‘necessary’ of a Texas rep’s plan to file to impeach the judge.” “It’s nothing of the kind, and cheering it only makes Musk look reckless—a reputation he doesn’t need when many DOGE actions also face court challenge,” the board wrote. Meanwhile, the Republican impeachment efforts have led to warnings from sitting federal judges that the campaign to clear the federal bench of anyone who rules against Trump will chill the judicial branch from applying the law out of fear of retribution or even violence. “Impeachment is not—shouldn’t be—a short circuiting of that process, and so it is concerning if impeachment is used in a way that is designed to do just that,” U.S. Appeals Court Judge Richard Sullivan said at a news conference earlier in March, according to a report from Bloomberg Law. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, meanwhile, issued a statement condemning the calls for judicial impeachments. "For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose,” Roberts said in a curt statement on Tuesday—a sign he thinks the impeachment talk is dangerous and not merely bluster. But Trump doesn't care about any of that. He's been shredding the Constitution to carry out his dream of being a dictator. He's already ignoring court orders and is now backing up the House Republican efforts to impeach judges who stop their illegal actions.

Constitution-trashing fascist mad king Donald Trump, echoing the lead of right-wing media talking heads and other GOP politicians, called for the impeachment of Judge James Boasberg for correctly ruling that Trump’s declaration of the Alien Enemies Act was lawless.

SCOTUS Chief Justice John Roberts was less than amused by Trump’s threats to Boasberg and the judiciary as a whole.

See Also:

NCRM: Trump Pushes to Impeach ‘Radical Left Lunatic’ Judge in Unhinged Morning Rant

NCRM: Chief Justice Roberts Smacks Down Trump's Lawless Call To Impeach Boasberg

The Guardian: Chief justice rebukes Trump for call to impeach judge hearing deportation case

The Parnas Perspective (Aaron Parnas): BREAKING: Donald Trump Calls For The Impeachment Of The Federal Judge Who Ruled Against Him

Civil Discourse (Joyce Vance): John Roberts Weighs In

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José Olivares at The Guardian:

The Trump administration on Friday asked the US supreme court to intervene to allow the government to continue to deport immigrants using the obscure Alien Enemies Act. The request came one day after a federal appeals court upheld a Washington DC federal judge’s temporary block on immigrant expulsions via the wartime act, which allows the administration to bypass normal due process, for example by allowing people a court hearing before shipping them out of the US. Friday’s emergency request claims that the federal court’s order temporarily blocking the removal of Venezuelans forces the US to “harbor individuals whom national-security officials have identified as members of a foreign terrorist organization bent upon grievously harming Americans.” Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act has spurred a legal battle between the executive and judiciary branches of the US federal government. As the executive branch continues to battle the constitutionally coequal judiciary branch for primacy, the US justice department said in its filing on Friday that the case presents the question of who decides how to conduct sensitive national security-related operations, the president or the judiciary. “The Constitution supplies a clear answer: the President,” the department wrote. “The republic cannot afford a different choice.“ On 15 March, Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a wartime statute allowing the government to expel foreign nationals considered to be enemies to the US. When invoking the act, Trump, without proof, claimed that the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua had “infiltrated” the US at the behest of the Venezuelan government. A US intelligence document accessed by the New York Times contradicts Trump’s claim about the Venezuelan government’s ties to the gang.

The Trump Regime askes SCOTUS to permit deportations of immigrants under the meritless Alien Enemies Act declaration.