WASHINGTON, D.C. — Lawyers for the Trump administration defended the weekend flights that deported hundreds of alleged Venezuelan gang members despite a federal judge’s order to turn those planes around.
U.S. District Judge James Boasberg gave the Department of Justice a deadline of noon ET on Tuesday to provide a sworn declaration with details on how planeloads of alleged members of the Tren de Aragua gang landed in El Salvador — hours after Boasberg issued emergency orders blocking the Trump administration from using wartime powers to immediately deport people.
Lawyers for the Justice Department complied, providing a sworn declaration that no individual deported after the judge’s written order was removed under those wartime powers.
But at the same time, the department struck a defiant note, insisting in a court filing that Boasberg had “no justification” to seek more information about two deportation flights that left the U.S. before his written order.
DOJ lawyers also repeated some of the arguments they made at a hearing Monday, insisting they had not violated the court’s written order because those flights had already left U.S. airspace and that the court’s earlier oral statements to turn around any planes already in the air were “not independently enforceable as injunctions.”
The filings come amid escalating tensions between the White House and the judiciary, as President Trump appeared to call for the removal of the judge overseeing the case.
Trump complained about “This Radical Left Lunatic of a Judge, a troublemaker and agitator who was sadly appointed by Barack Hussein Obama” in a post on his Truth Social platform on Tuesday. Trump did not mention Boasberg by name. But said that “This judge, like many of the Crooked Judges’ I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED!!”
That prompted a rare statement from Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts.
“For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision,” the court said in a statement from Roberts. “The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.”
