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20-04-2025
WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump’s administration could be held in criminal contempt of court for disobeying an order to stop the deportations of alleged Venezuelan gang members who could not challenge their deportation, federal judge James Boasberg said on Wednesday.
Boasberg has given the US government one week to remedy its dismissal of his order by providing the deported men with the right to due process in court. The Trump administration has appealed the ruling. The judge’s Wednesday ruling is the latest addition to the growing pile of legal challenges that Trump’s executive orders and actions are facing.
So, what does it mean to be held in contempt of court? What’s next? And what happens if a president simply refuses to follow a court’s orders?
What happened?
Late on March 15, Boasberg had issued a temporary restraining order preventing the Trump administration from exercising the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to carry out deportations. Boasberg is the chief judge of the District Court for the District of Columbia.
The Alien Enemies Act gives the US president the discretion to detain or deport non-citizens during wartime. The president can carry out these deportations based solely on citizenship status, without a hearing.
While issuing the restraining order, Boasberg had also ordered that deportation flights en route to El Salvador turn around and return.
Hours after this restraining order was issued, on the morning of March 16, El Salvador President Nayib Bukele claimed in an X post that his country had received 238 members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua and 23 members of the Salvadoran gang MS-13 from the US. Bukele also reposted a news snippet about Boasberg’s ruling, captioning it; “Oopsie … Too late” with a crying-with-laughter emoji.
The alleged gang members are being held in a maximum-security prison in El Salvador, the Centre for the Confinement of Terrorism (Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo) or CECOT.
In a post on March 18 on his Truth Social platform, Trump called Boasberg a “Radical Left Lunatic” and called for his impeachment. Trump’s impeachment call was shot down by Chief Justice John Roberts, who said that “impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision.”
Boasberg had also demanded that the government reveal the flight timings of the plane that carried those deportees, to establish whether it indeed could have turned around and returned to the US following his order but on March 24, the US Department of Justice revealed that the Trump administration was invoking the “state secrets privilege” to avoid providing these details. The doctrine is supposed to be invoked when military or national security interests are at risk.
On April 3, Boasberg weighed contempt during a hearing where he pressed the Justice Department to find out whether the Trump administration had flouted the restraining order. The Justice Department denied this, saying the flights had already left the US by the time the restraining order was filed.
The US Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to deport immigrants on April 7, but held that they must get a court hearing before they are deported.
What did Judge Boasberg say?
In a 46-page ruling on Wednesday, Boasberg wrote that the Trump administration’s actions were “sufficient for the court to conclude that probable cause exists to find the government in criminal contempt”. (Int’l News Desk)
