Rule of Law News: Tracking the Trump Administration's Defiance of Court Orders

Politics & Elections
1

For the purposes of this thread, appealing a court decision does not count, because such behavior is lawful and routine. Ambiguity should be noted.

Here are 2 examples.

Trump deported almost 300 Venezualan citizens to an El Salvador prison without the usual reviews, in defiance of U.S. District Judge James Boasberg order to block deportations under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. Whether the deportations were contemptuous of the court is not 100% clear because of issues of timing. Gifted Washington Post:

https://wapo.st/4kvBqVe

Gifted NYT article with more analysis and less human interest:

Same weekend, the Trump regime deported a professor and kidney transplant specialist at Brown University’s medical school in conflict with a federal court order. Gifted:

Roundup at the invaluable TPM:

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/morning-memo/trumps-open-defiance-of-federal-courts-is-now-at-hand

ETA:
Volokh Conspiracy: Dated article on court battle regarding the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which is suppose to apply only during wartime:

2

Two things:
How can Venezuela refuse to accept its deported citizens?
Doesn’t this (again) call into question about being “at war” if Congress has not declared a war? What does “at war” even mean anymore?

3

Third example:

Homan: “We’re not stopping. I don’t care what the judges think. I don’t care what the left thinks. We’re coming.”

As reported here:

Trump’s Cabinet people were selected on the basis of their loyalty to Trump, and they’ve clearly been coached about what to say, and how to say it. So I’m assuming this is the officially unofficial position of the whole administration. They’re clearly planning to push this as far as they can, to see how effectively anyone else can push back.

4

  1. You can do lots of things if you don’t feel constrained by international law, human rights, or the law in general. Middle income countries dip in and out of the bad governance of the Maduro regime from time to time.

  2. Over at Volokh, Ilya Somin links to a discussion about why drug cartel activities are different than wartime invasions. But the key question I think is one of timing. From the NYT article:

“This sure looks like contempt of court to me,” said David Super, a law professor at Georgetown University. “You can turn around a plane if you want to.” …

Mr. Super, the Georgetown law professor, said the Justice Department’s arguments for deference to the president’s sole power to conduct foreign policy may be weighed by an appeals court when it considers whether to uphold Judge Boasberg’s order, but they do not provide a justification for violating the order.

“You have to comply with court orders until they’re reversed,” he said. “Otherwise, you and I become our own courts. We follow what we think is right, we violate what we think is wrong, and the judges may as well go home.”

5

We are swiftly finding out the difference between “supposed to” and “have to”, I think.

6

To me, this has always been the greatest danger.

If you live in a country that is purportedly governed by the rule of law, but some persons in power decide that those laws don’t apply to them, then what you’re left with is anarchy.

People must to take this onboard and understand the larger ramifications for us all.

7

No. If you live in a country that is purportedly governed by the rule of law, but some persons in power decide that those laws don’t apply to them, then what you’re left with is authoritarianism. Anarchy is rare. Authoritarianism is common, even typical historically speaking.

It is interesting but not unexpected that the first blatant attack on our constitutional order will involve the regime’s mass deportation policy, which is popular with their base. Trump could have proposed a bill and done all of this legally. That’s what Presidents do. But Trump doesn’t want to be President: he wants to be king.

Not without a fight Mr President.

8

Apropos of absolutely nothing, may I simply add:

Sic semper tyrannis

[End of Message]

9

Does the Trump excuse, “we were over international waters” actually have any legal legitimacy? I would think not. If the president was ordered to turn the planes back the order should still stand no matter where the plane was at the time, it isn’t like he’s violating some gambling ordinance, that is linked to a jurisdiction. Still in all the reports I’ve heard on this in the last day, none have actually analyzed the legality of such a claim.

10

Chief D.C. District Judge James Boasberg sought details regarding the shipping of Venezualan citizens to El Salvadorian prisons, without due process. The judge attempted to ascertain why they disobeyed his court order. Top-notch journalist Josh Kovensky at TPM, numbers added:

A Trump Justice Department attorney asserted to a top D.C. federal judge at a hearing Monday afternoon that the government could disobey court orders so long as it was 1) conducting activities outside of the United States, 2) if the order was issued verbally, or 3) if it deemed information that it’s required to provide subject to national security concerns.

Number (2) is a doozy. It’s also a tell: the removal of Venezuelan citizens was conducted outside of US law. I presume it happened in the minutes or hours between the judge’s verbal orders and his written orders.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/trump-admin-ups-defiance-of-court-over-alien-enemies-act-removals

“The point is that even if the enjoined acts were outside the territory or jurisdiction of the United States, you can’t violate an injunction,” Boasberg said. “You might not like it.”

The President has de facto immunity from prosecution for illegal acts according the corrupted Supreme Court, despite the fact that the Founders never endowed Presidents with such an umbrella. Those lower on the totem poll do not, though they can be beneficiaries of Presidential pardons. This is where we are, as I understand it.

11

If it does, it opens a whole new can of worms. How many vessels controlled by the US government are currently in or over international waters? Well, a huge chunk of the Navy, to begin with. Can Trump just order them to do “whatever”, just because they’re in international waters?

12

I recall a lecture at law school, given by the school’s crustiest professor (cf. Professor Kingsfield in The Paper Chase). He was telling us what “rule of law” means, and getting pretty worked up about it, and I well remember his definition:

“Rule of Law means that you don’t make shit up!”

The SCOTUS giving Trump immunity, the “international waters” bullcrap, is making shit up. It’s just that simple. Under my professor’s definition, the United States has ceased to be a Rule of Law country.

13

I believe the court (Judge Boasberg) is waiting for the administration to actually make that claim before taking too close a look at it, and it seems the media is catching on to Trump’s methods. I think in the past, you would have had pundits all over the airwaves arguing that point, giving it legs without team Trump saying anything. That just helps Trump, particularly in the court of public opinion. It’s much better to just ignore it until it appears in an affidavit or court pleading.

14

Well, to be honest, even without that ruling a sitting president would never be prosecuted for illegal acts.

15

To be clear, I’m referring to prosecution of a President following his Presidency. Last year’s decision essentially said that Democratic Presidents could be prosecuted that way, but not Republican Presidents, at least given the makeup of this corrupt and corrupted SCOTUS.

More news. Bloomberg reports that the eyebrows of Chief Justice Roberts are furrowed:

US Chief Justice John Roberts said the impeachment of federal judges is “not an appropriate response” to disagreement with their rulings, issuing an extraordinary statement hours after President Donald Trump called for removal of a judge in Washington.

“For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision,” the Supreme Court’s leader said Tuesday in an emailed statement. “The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.”

I’m not sure I’d call that extraordinary, given Trump’s attacks on Justice Boasberg. To avoid sanewashing, I’ll provide Trump’s public statement calling for Boasberg’s impeachment in full:

This Radical Left Lunatic of a Judge, a troublemaker and agitator who was sadly appointed by Barack Hussein Obama, was not elected President - He didn’t WIN the popular VOTE (by a lot!), he didn’t WIN ALL SEVEN SWING STATES, he didn’t WIN 2,750 to 525 Counties, HE DIDN’T WIN ANYTHING! I WON FOR MANY REASONS, IN AN OVERWHELMING MANDATE, BUT FIGHTING ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION MAY HAVE BEEN THE NUMBER ONE REASON FOR THIS HISTORIC VICTORY. I’m just doing what the VOTERS wanted me to do. This judge, like many of the Crooked Judges’ I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED!!! WE DON’T WANT VICIOUS, VIOLENT, AND DEMENTED CRIMINALS, MANY OF THEM DERANGED MURDERERS, IN OUR COUNTRY. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!

Trump’s margin of victory was not large, historically. Obama’s popular vote margin and electoral college votes exceeded that of Trump 2024, both times.

16

This is a monitoring thread. Here’s a followup of the above.

The situation was resolved to the judges satisfaction, who learned that the Professor was reportedly deported before they learned of the court order. As quoted in TPM’s Morning Memo, bolding added.

The Court appreciates the prompt response by the government. Supported by an affidavit from the CBP Watch Commander, the government explains that CBP Officers at Logan did not receive notice of the Court’s Order from their legal counsel until after Dr. Alawieh “had already departed the United States” and that “[a]t no time would CBP not take a court order seriously or fail to abide by a court’s order.”

17

Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post comes out in favor of rule of law. Their editorial focuses on Musk, following the conservative tradition of blaming the king’s advisors.

Daily Beast:

The New York Post editorial board dissed Musk Sunday in a scathing piece headlined “Sorry, Elon: Even deporting illegal gangbangers must heed the rule of law.”

It warned Musk that he is “way out of his lane” for demanding the impeachment of James Boasberg, the federal judge who tried to stop deportation flights of Venezuelans to El Salvador on Saturday—and came before Chief Justice John Roberts issued a brutal and exceptionally rare rebuke to Trump for making the same demand.

18

Why just ignore court orders when you can impeach the judges you disagree with?

https://www.axios.com/2025/03/18/donald-trump-impeach-judge-house-republicans

Just hours after President Trump called for the impeachment of a federal judge who ruled against his deportation of hundreds of Venezuelans over the weekend, House Republicans introduced a measure to do just that.

Why it matters: GOP lawmakers have unleashed an unprecedented flood of long-shot impeachment articles aimed at federal judges who are standing in the way of the president’s agenda.

  • James Boasberg, chief judge of the D.C. District Court, is at least the fifth federal judge who is facing a House GOP impeachment attempt after issuing a ruling unfavorable to the administration.
19

The Venezuelan deportations case is being mirrored on CourtListener:

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69741724/jgg-v-trump/

Most recent news, yesterday, was the govt. invoking the state secrets privilege to avoid divulging more information about the two flights to the judge.

The Court has all of the facts it needs to address the compliance issues before
it. Further intrusions on the Executive Branch would present dangerous and wholly unwarranted separation-of-powers harms with respect to diplomatic and national security concerns that the Court lacks competence to address. Accordingly, the states secrets privilege forecloses further demands for details that have no place in this matter, and the government will address the Court’s order to show cause tomorrow by demonstrating that there is no basis for the suggestion of noncompliance with any binding order.

And they do give more detailed arguments in yesterday’s filing.

~Max

20

Judge Boasberg’s take on the rule of law as applied to this case, from last week,

But, as explained above, the Court seeks the factual information at issue in order to determine whether the Government complied with the TROs. Whether those TROs were legally defective or legally sound does not govern the compliance inquiry. As the Supreme Court has made crystal clear, the proper recourse for a party subject to an injunction it believes is legally flawed — and is indeed later shown to be so flawed — is appellate review, not disobedience. As the Court reiterated in Walker v. City of Birmingham, 388 U.S. 307 (1967),

An injunction duly issuing out of a court of general jurisdiction
with equity powers, upon pleadings properly invoking its action,
and served upon persons made parties therein and within the
jurisdiction, must be obeyed by them, however erroneous the
action of the court may be, even if the error be in the assumption of
the validity of a seeming, but void law going to the merits of the
case. It is for the court of first instance to determine the question of
the validity of the law, and until its decision is reversed for error by
orderly review, either by itself or by a higher court, its orders based
on its decision are to be respected, and disobedience of them is
contempt of its lawful authority, to be punished.

Id. at 314 (emphasis added) (quoting Howat v. Kansas, 258 U.S. 181, 189–90 (1922)). That “rule of law,” the Supreme Court explained, “reflects a belief that in the fair administration of justice no man can be judge in his own case,” no matter how “exalted his station” or “righteous his motives.” Id. at 320–21.

~Max