As chief judge of the Federal District Court of the District of Columbia since 2023, Judge James E. Boasberg has been responsible for setting the tone of the court through some of its highest-profile dealings with President Trump, including overseeing the end of grand jury inquiries in both federal cases against Mr. Trump, the 2020 elections case and the president’s handling of classified documents.

But in the last several days, Judge Boasberg and his court have been drawn into a battle with the Trump administration over immigration enforcement that threatens, more than anything to date, to pitch the branches of government into a constitutional crisis.

Over the weekend, the Trump administration sent three planes carrying 238 migrants from Venezuela to El Salvador, even as Judge Boasberg ordered a halt to the deportations and turning the planes around. Shortly before the migrants were expelled, Mr. Trump signed an executive order invoking the Alien Enemies Act, a law from 1798 that gives the president power to deport citizens and subjects of any foreign nation with which the United States is at war or which are in the process of an invasion. Mr. Trump’s order justified the deportations by accusing the migrants of being members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang that he charged with “conducting irregular warfare against the territory of the United States both directly and at the direction, clandestine or otherwise,” of President Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela.

On Monday, the threat of a showdown between the executive and the judicial branches appeared to grow, as Justice Department lawyers stonewalled Judge Boasberg and tried to get him removed from the case, refusing to answer any of his questions about the deportation flights and claiming Mr. Trump had unfettered power to remove immigrants from the United States that could not be questioned by the courts. It worsened still after Mr. Trump called for Judge Boasberg’s impeachment on his social media platform, Truth Social, and the Supreme Court’s chief justice, John G. Roberts Jr., rebuked the idea in a public statement.

Here’s more about Judge Boasberg, the jurist going toe-to-toe with the Trump administration.

Judge Boasberg, who goes by the nickname Jeb, spent his formative years in Washington, D.C., while his father worked for Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration. He went to St. Albans, an all-boys prep school, and attended Yale University, where he played basketball and was a member of the secretive Skull and Bones club. During law school at Yale, he lived with Brett Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court justice.

Before Judge Boasberg wore robes, he was a homicide prosecutor in Washington, D.C. President George W. Bush, a fellow Yale and Skull and Bones member, gave him his first job on the bench in 2002, as an associate judge of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia. Nine years later, former President Barack Obama nominated him to the federal bench in the capital, a position for which he was unanimously confirmed.

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