White House locks horns with judiciary over deportations
The Trump administration is on a collision course with the courts after a week spent taunting a federal judge and escalating a battle over whether his orders have been defied.
Administration officials on March 15 rebuffed an oral order from U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg to turn around or halt flights of Venezuelan migrants headed to a Salvadoran prison.
In the week since, they have lashed out at the judge inside and outside of court, diminishing Boasberg's authority over the matter and repeatedly refusing to provide requested information in court. President Trump and allies in Congress have even floated impeaching Boasberg — sparking some rare public pushback from Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts.
While the week began with broad attacks on Boasberg’s ruling over the flights, it concluded with Trump decrying the entire concept of nationwide injunctions to halt his agenda and calling for the Supreme Court to intervene.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said in an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he agreed with those who said the U.S. was in a constitutional crisis.
“Look, Donald Trump is a lawless, angry man. He thinks he should be king,” Schumer said. “He thinks he should do whatever he wants, regardless of the law, and he thinks judges should just listen to him.”
“Defying court orders is why our democracy is at risk, and we'll have to do everything to fight back in that regard,” he added.
Numerous Trump officials have suggested the federal bench can't interfere with Trump’s foreign policy, despite judges routinely reviewing immigration policy and other major national security matters.
Attorney General Pam Bondi said Boasberg had “no right” to ask questions seeking more information about the flights that deported alleged Venezuelan gang members.
Stephen Miller, the deputy chief of staff to the president who has been central to the administration’s sweeping push to crackdown on immigration and ramp up deportations, sparred with television anchors over the case and argued Trump telegraphed his plans on the campaign trail.
“The American people voted for this specific action to occur. It has occurred, and it is occurring, and it will continue to occur,” Miller said. And the idea that a single district court judge has the authority to direct as though they were the president, the movement of airplanes around the globe, again it is the most outrageous thing I have seen from a district court judge in my lifetime, but frankly going back multiple lifetimes.”
Trump and some of his aides have not shied away from trolling their critics, dating back to the 2024 campaign. They have leaned into that in recent days, as the administration has seemingly embraced the controversy surrounding the case and Boasberg’s order.
“The president will always follow the law, but this judge was too slow. We played a little game of ‘catch me if you can,’ and guess what, the judge wasn’t able to catch us on this one,” deputy press secretary Harrison Fields said Tuesday on NewsNation’s “Morning in America.”
In another media appearance during the week, Fields suggested Boasberg’s ruling was pushing the nation closer to a constitutional crisis, turning around a line of attack that has become common among alarmed watchdogs and Democrats.
The White House posted a video to its social media account this week that featured footage of migrants in handcuffs being patted down by Border Patrol and put on a plane. The video was set to the song “Closing Time” by Semisonic, which drew a rebuke from the band.
“I think it sums up our immigration policy pretty well. 'You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here,'” press secretary Karoline Leavitt said, quoting a line from the song.
Border czar Tom Homan said the administration would not stop its deportation efforts, telling Fox News, “I don’t care what the judges think.”
Trump has at multiple points said he would not openly defy a court order and that his administration would appeal rulings it disagreed with.
But the administration’s combative approach has drawn rebukes from legal groups and Democrats who view Trump and his aides as attempting to consolidate power and undermine the judiciary.
“For more than 200 years, our legal system has afforded individuals the right to disagree with judicial decisions and to appeal them if they are the aggrieved party,” the American Bar Association said in a statement this week.
“Targeting judges personally or threatening to remove them because they rule a certain way has never been acceptable. Such efforts are intended to intimidate judges and our courts and weaken public trust and confidence in our judicial system.”
Roberts himself made the same argument.
“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,” he said in a rare public statement shortly after Trump’s calls for impeachment.
Boasberg on Friday made clear he intends to push back against the Trump administration, including on whether officials flouted his order to turn around flights of Venezuelans headed to El Salvador.
“The government’s not being terribly cooperative at this point, but I will get to the bottom of whether they violated my order, who ordered this and what the consequences will be,” Boasberg said during a Friday hearing.
The Justice Department (DOJ) this week repeatedly refused to share details about flights carrying more than 230 Venezuelans to El Savlador — flight plans that would help Boasberg sort out whether the government complied with an oral order he gave at around 6:45 p.m. March 15, as well as a written order that was posted to the docket at 7:27 p.m. that same day.
At a Monday hearing a DOJ attorney repeatedly told Boasberg he was “not authorized” to disclose more information about the flights.
Then when asked to explain the legal rationale behind their refusal to do so, DOJ again demurred, writing in a filing that “there is no justification to order the provision of additional information, and that doing so would be inappropriate.”
DOJ was then directed to provide the flight information to Boasberg under seal, but Boasberg indicated it again did not do so, instead submitting a sworn statement from a midlevel immigration official saying the Cabinet was discussing whether to invoke the state secrets privilege. That would limit sharing with Boasberg, who has handled highly sensitive classified information previously through his role as a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court judge.
Boasberg said the response was “woefully insufficient” and “evaded” obligations to show the administration complied with an earlier court ruling.
Though both oral and written orders are binding, the White House has repeatedly asserted it complied with Boasberg’s written directive, while failing to mention his verbal instruction.
“We are 100 percent confident that we've complied,” Leavitt told reporters Thursday.
“And as I've said from the podium and will continue to say, all of the flights that were subject to the written order of the judge took off before the written order was pushed in the courtroom.”