Left: Donald Trump speaks at the annual Road to Majority conference in Washington, DC, in June 2024 (Allison Bailey/NurPhoto via AP). Right: U.S. District Judge James Boasberg (U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia).
A federal judge in Washington, D.C., is holding the Trump administration in criminal contempt for ignoring his order, issued last month, to turn around multiple planes carrying Venezuelan migrants that were being deported without due process through the president’s unprecedented use of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 (AEA).
U.S. District Judge James Boasberg on Wednesday said he had determined that the federal government demonstrated a “willful disregard” for his order “sufficient for the Court to conclude that probable cause exists to find the Government in criminal contempt.”
“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,” Boasberg wrote in a 46-page order. “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.””
On March 15, the ACLU sued for — and won — a temporary restraining order barring the administration from deporting individuals under the AEA. During the emergency hearing, Boasberg issued an oral bench ruling to cease removals under the auspices of the AEA along with a directive to turn planes around containing Venezuelan migrants that had taken off shortly before the proceedings and return them to the U.S. — an order that was infamously ignored.
The government claimed that the flights had already left U.S. airspace and were therefore outside of the court’s jurisdiction. Administration officials also asserted that they did not have to follow Boasberg’s oral order to turn the planes around because he did not memorialize the directive in his subsequent written order.
Boasberg addressed this directly in Wednesday’s order holding the government in contempt.
“Defendants provide no convincing reason to avoid the conclusion that appears obvious from the above factual recitation: that they deliberately flouted this Court’s written Order and, separately, its oral command that explicitly delineated what compliance entailed,” Boasberg wrote. “They do not dispute that it was hours after the written Order issued when they disembarked the class members aboard the two planes and transferred them out of U.S. custody. Rather than offer a mea culpa and attempt to explain this grave error and detail plans to rectify it, Defendants offer various imaginative arguments for why they nevertheless technically complied with the Order. None of their positions withstands scrutiny.”
Hearings and court filings in the high-profile case grew increasingly contentious as the litigation unfolded until earlier this month when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the case — which was brought in Washington, D.C., as a class-action lawsuit under the Administrative Procedures Act — had to have been filed as a habeas corpus case in Texas, the district where the plaintiffs were being detained. Habeas petitions involve detainees challenging the legality of their custody and typically seeking to be released.
The court further gave the defendants a chance to “purge their contempt” if by April 23, they file a declaration “explaining the steps they have taken and will take to do so.”
“If Defendants opt not to purge their contempt, they shall instead file by April 23, 2025, declaration(s) identifying the individual(s) who, with knowledge of the Court’s classwide Temporary Restraining Order, made the decision not to halt the transfer of class members out of U.S. custody on March 15 and 16, 2025,” Boasberg wrote.
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