The Trump administration is now facing possible criminal prosecution for ignoring a court order to immediately turn around deportation planes covertly bound for El Salvador last month, with a federal judge concluding that government officials “acted contemptuously.”
D.C. Chief Judge James Boasberg on Wednesday found probable cause that President Donald Trump’s officials committed criminal contempt. He also gave the White House a possible narrow way out: Get the hundreds of migrants who were rapidly sent to a Salvadoran prison back into U.S. custody, a measure that would offer those Venezuelan and Salvadoran migrants who were living in the United States an opportunity to legally challenge their removals.
If federal agents refuse, Boasberg said he would subject government officials to questioning under oath. And in what would be a historic turn, the federal judge indicated he is even ready to assign a special prosecutor if the Trump-controlled Department of Justice won’t criminally investigate itself.
“The Constitution does not tolerate willful disobedience of judicial orders — especially by officials of a coordinate branch who have sworn an oath to uphold it,” Boasberg wrote.
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Wednesday’s order marked a stunning — if inevitable — intensification of the fight between the White House and the judicial branch.
Boasberg repeatedly castigated the executive branch throughout his 46-page order over the way it undertook a rapid deportation operation that cited a wartime measure to transport undocumented migrants to a Salvadoran prison accused of torturing inmates.
Trump signed an order on March 14 invoking the Alien Enemies Act to target anyone whom government officials deem members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua and subject them to rushed removals. The next day, three flights full of migrants departed from U.S. airports bound for El Salvador, part of an agreement struck with the Central American nation’s president that would place the detainees at the mega-prison known as the Terrorism Confinement Center.
Boasberg determined the operational strategy was a deliberate attempt to deny the migrants any chance at due process, calling out the way immigration security forces had quietly put the operation “into motion weeks earlier” — only for Justice Department lawyers to claim total ignorance about the matter during the pivotal moments in his courtroom on a Saturday afternoon when the flights were departing Texas, even as the judge was ordering them to return.
“The government’s actions on that day demonstrate a willful disregard,” he wrote, censuring officials for keeping details about the operation “obscured from the court.”
Boasberg also called out Secretary of State Marco Rubio, pointing to the way the Rubio retweeted Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s “Oopsie … Too late” taunt aimed at the judge’s order to turn around the flights. The judge called them “boasts” that were made “deliberately and gleefully.”
The judge’s condemnation also touched on the White House’s decision to treat this matter as a political inconvenience that doesn’t require turning over information about how it ignored Boasberg’s orders. The judge pointed out what he called “increasing obstructionism on the part of the government as it refused to answer basic questions about what happened.”
The original case before Boasberg met its end when the Supreme Court recently determined that any legal challenges to these kinds of removals of people the Trump administration has deemed “alien enemies” should take place in local courts where the detainees are being held. But in his decision on Wednesday, Boasberg focused on the Trump administration’s refusal to abide by court orders, an underlying issue that is likely to once again return to the Supreme Court.
What’s next is up to the DOJ, which can take steps to bring the migrants back to U.S. custody — even if that means keeping them outside the United States, the judge explained. But if the administration refuses to budge, Washington could soon see its first mini-trial in the Trump administration’s battle with the judiciary.
That could entail punishment directed squarely at specific high-ranking federal officials, possibly even dragging them into court.
“In the event that defendants do not choose to purge their contempt, the court will proceed to identify the individual(s) responsible for the contumacious conduct by determining whose ‘specific act or omission’ caused the noncompliance. Should those be unsatisfactory, the court will proceed either to hearings with live witness testimony under oath or to depositions conducted by plaintiffs,” Boasberg wrote.
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Jose Pagliery is a reporter at NOTUS.
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