Left: Chief U.S. District Judge James Boasberg (U.S. District Courts). Right: President Donald Trump observes military demonstrations at Fort Bragg, Tuesday, June 10, 2025, in Fort Bragg, N.C. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
After a federal judge in April found probable cause to hold the Trump administration in criminal contempt for ignoring an order to turn Alien Enemies Act (AEA) deportation flights around, two circuit judges appointed by President Donald Trump took the rare step Friday of granting the “extraordinary remedy” of a writ of mandamus nuking that threat.
U.S. Circuit Judges Gregory Katsas and Neomi Rao took Chief U.S. District Judge for the District of Columbia James Boasberg to the proverbial woodshed, over the lone dissent of their colleague U.S. Circuit Judge Nina Pillard, a Barack Obama appointee.
Boasberg, an Obama appointee also appointed by George W. Bush to the D.C. Superior Court, was recently the subject of an ethics complaint signed by U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi”s chief of staff, Chad Mizelle.
That complaint, similar to court filings that claimed Boasberg encroached on the government’s sovereignty and acted as if he could order the “invasion of a foreign country” to facilitate the return of “over 100” alleged Tren de Aragua gang members imprisoned in El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) following their hurried March deportations, cast the chief judge as out to get the administration for raising colleagues’ concerns in a private setting that the government would “disregard rulings of federal courts” and open the door to “a constitutional crisis.”
Just days after those remarks at a judicial conference, Boasberg orally issued a temporary restraining order blocking deportation flights to El Salvador and demanding that any planes in the air turn around. The Trump administration flouted that order.
When Boasberg, in April, held the Trump administration in criminal contempt for violating a temporary restraining order the U.S. Supreme Court would later vacate, he said that he did not do so “lightly.”
“The Court does not reach such conclusion lightly or hastily; indeed, it has given Defendants ample opportunity to rectify or explain their actions. None of their responses has been satisfactory,” the chief judge wrote. “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. To permit such officials to freely ‘annul the judgments of the courts of the United States’ would not just ‘destroy the rights acquired under those judgments’; it would make ‘a solemn mockery’ of ‘the constitution itself.’ ‘So fatal a result must be deprecated by all.'”
The administration responded by appealing to the D.C. Circuit, seeking “extraordinary” relief in the form of a writ of mandamus, an order “compelling the judge to correct their earlier mistake.”
On Friday, Katas and Rao concurred that a writ of mandamus was warranted to vacate Boasberg’s “contempt-related order.”
In his concurrence, Katsas began by remarking upon the “extraordinary, ongoing confrontation between the Executive and Judicial Branches” and then turning down the temperature.
There’s an “unsettled issue whether the judiciary may impose criminal contempt for violating injunctions entered without jurisdiction,” Katsas said, noting the ambiguousness of the term “removing” in Boasberg’s order made it such that the Trump administration should escape the contempt threat.
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“At the end of this dispute lies a much simpler question. By its terms, the TRO prohibited the government from ‘removing’ suspected TdA members. This prohibition could be interpreted in either of two ways. It might have barred the government simply from expelling detainees from United States territory,” Katsas wrote. “Or, it might have barred the government from surrendering custody of the detainees to a foreign sovereign.”
“All agree that the government did not violate the TRO under the former view, so the contempt question boils down to a straightforward interpretive dispute over what constituted ‘removing’ within the meaning of the TRO,” he added, writing that since the temporary restraining order “could reasonably have been read either way” at the time there was no probable cause supporting a “criminal-contempt conviction here.”
While acknowledging that a writ of mandamus is not something an appellate court would itself issue lightly, Katsas stated it was “appropriate” relief because the Trump administration is “plainly correct about the merits of the criminal contempt.”
The D.C. Circuit’s reaching of that conclusion, he continued, would serve to ratchet down a protracted fight between the executive and judicial branches, rife with “contentious issues regarding the courts’ power to control foreign policy or prosecutions, or to impose criminal sanctions for violating injunctions entered without jurisdiction.”
Rao agreed in a separate concurrence, calling Boasberg’s contempt order, which hinged on his supremely overturned restraining order, a “clear abuse of discretion” that should not keep the administration under threat of contempt.
“The district court’s order is a ‘clear abuse of discretion’ that warrants the ‘drastic and extraordinary remedy’ of mandamus,” Rao wrote, potentially giving the administration a green light to ignore court orders that end up being overturned later. “When an injunction has been vacated, as occurred here, a district court loses the authority to coerce compliance with the order.”
“Punishment through criminal contempt might still be available in these circumstances, but the district court cannot use the threat of such punishment as a backdoor to obtain compliance with a vacated and therefore unenforceable TRO,” Rao explained.
Rao further called Boasberg’s invocation of contempt powers an “especially egregious” abuse for encroaching on the separation of powers and Trump’s authority over “foreign affairs.”
“Lacking the authority to compel obedience, the district court nonetheless pressured the government to take custody of alleged alien enemies held in El Salvador. This intrusion on the President’s foreign affairs authority ‘constitute[s] an unwarranted impairment of another branch in the performance of its constitutional duties,'” the circuit judge went on. “Because the order exceeds the court’s authority and amounts to a clear abuse of discretion, mandamus is appropriate.”
While Katsas said he would “terminate the criminal-contempt proceeding” in its entirety, Rao stopped just short of that — but in the end, they both vacated Boasberg’s order.
“We have before us only the district court’s preliminary order on probable cause, an order that seeks to use the threat of criminal contempt to coerce compliance with a TRO vacated by the Supreme Court. Because the immediate harm is the unlawful choice the district court imposed, vacating the order is the appropriate and necessary remedy,” she explained.
Pillard, in dissent, would not and did not go so far, emphasizing that court orders need to be followed even if they end up being overturned.
“The rule of law depends on obedience to judicial orders. Yet, shortly after the district court granted plaintiffs’ emergency motion for a temporary restraining order, defendants appear to have disobeyed it,” she said. “Our system of courts cannot long endure if disappointed litigants defy court orders with impunity rather than legally challenge them. That is why willful disobedience of a court order is punishable as criminal contempt.”
