After a week of evasions, missed deadlines, and desperate attempts to remove him from the case, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg pledged to hold the Trump administration accountable if it violated his order not to deport suspected Venezuelan gang members.
“The government is not being terribly cooperative,” Boasberg said in a hearing on Friday afternoon, The New York Times reported. “I will get to the bottom of whether they violated my order, who ordered this, and what the consequences will be.”
The judge is considering whether the president violated the law when he invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport suspected members of a Venezuelan gang without questioning. He is also considering whether the administration ignored his order on Saturday to halt the deportations so that he had more time to consider the underlying legal issues.
“The policy ramifications of this are incredibly troublesome and problematic and concerning,” Boasberg said.
Boasberg excoriated lawyers for the Department of Justice for using “intemperate and disrespectful language” in briefs and set another hearing for early next week.
The extraordinary showdown between the executive and judicial branches began last week, when President Donald Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport suspected members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Agua without questioning. In a hearing on March 15, Boasberg ordered the administration not to deport any of the suspected gang members.
“Any plane containing these folks that is going to take off or is in the air needs to be returned to the United States,” Boasberg said.
Even so, two planes carrying 261 migrants landed in El Salvador the following day.
In court and in the press, the administration has claimed it did not violate the court’s order because the judge’s written order—which came 45 minutes after his oral order—was filed after the planes had taken off.
“All of the planes subject to the written order of this judge departed U.S. soil, U.S territory before the judge’s written order,” said White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on Monday. “There’s actually questions of whether a verbal order carries the same weight as a legal order, as a written order.”
The DOJ made that same argument in court on Thursday, writing in a trial brief that “an oral directive is not enforceable as an injunction.”
“That’s a heckuva stretch,” Boasberg said.
DOJ lawyers have thus far evaded questions from the judge about the timing of the flights, which it argued would “disclose sensitive information bearing on national security and foreign relations.”
On Thursday, Boasberg castigated the Trump administration, saying it had “again evaded its obligations” to provide information. The president has called for Boasberg to be impeached over the ruling, and his administration has asked an appeals court to rescind his original injunction.
The appeals court is scheduled to hear the DOJ’s appeal on Monday.
