U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg issued an order Wednesday stating that he has found probable cause to hold members of the Trump administration in criminal contempt for not complying with his directive to turn flights around and return deportees bound for El Salvador.
The White House responded, saying it will immediately appeal the ruling.
On March 15, Boasberg (who was appointed by President Barack Obama) issued a temporary restraining order stopping the removal of at least 261 alleged Tren de Aragua gang members by the Trump administration under the provision of the Alien Enemies Act.
Last week, the Supreme Court ruled that the Trump administration had the authority to remove the illegal aliens.
The court also said “that the detainees subject to removal orders under the AEA are entitled to notice and an opportunity to challenge their removal. The only question is which court will resolve that challenge.”
The justices held that the case at issue should not have been brought in the District of Columbia, where Boasberg presides, but in Texas, where the five plaintiffs in the case had been confined before being removed to a prison in El Salvador.
However, Boasberg in his Wednesday order said the fact that his court lacked jurisdiction over the matter does not excuse Trump administration officials from complying with his directives while the case was before him.
“One might … ask how this inquiry into compliance is able to proceed at all given that the Supreme Court vacated the [temporary restraining order] after the events in question. That Court’s later determination that the TRO suffered from a legal defect, however, does not excuse the Government’s violation,” he wrote.
“Instead, it is a foundational legal precept that every judicial order ‘must be obeyed’ — no matter how ‘erroneous’ it ‘may be’ — until a court reverses it,” Boasberg added, citing a 1967 Supreme Court case precedent.
Should Kilmar Abrego Garcia remain in El Salvador?
“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,” the judge contended. “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.’”
Boasberg directed if the administration would like “to purge their contempt, they shall file by April 23, 2025, a declaration explaining the steps they have taken and will take to do so.”
Purging the contempt charge would require the administration to take the deportees back into U.S. custody and give them hearings so they can challenge the allegations against them.
The “Government would not need to release any of those individuals, nor would it need to transport them back to the homeland” for that process, the judge wrote.
“The Court will also give [the government] an opportunity to propose other methods of coming into compliance, which the Court will evaluate,” he added.
If they “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,” he wrote.
If the administration fails to comply, the judge wrote, “the Court will proceed to identify the contemnor(s) and refer the matter for prosecution.”
Further, Boasberg said, if the Justice Department declines to prosecute the case and “the interest of justice requires,” the Court will “appoint another attorney to prosecute the contempt.”
In other, words the judge will pick his own prosecutor outside the DOJ, as D.C. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan sought to do when federal prosecutors wanted to dismiss the case against former Trump national security advisor Michael Flynn in 2020.
President Donald Trump ultimately pardoned Flynn in December of that year, forcing Sullivan to dismiss the case.
BTW this is the rule Boasberg cited in his opinion related to his authority to appoint a lawyer outside the government to pursue contempt charges.
This is the same rule cited by Emmet Sullivan in fighting the DOJ’s dismissal of the Mike Flynn case pic.twitter.com/XDo8WuW9xH
— Julie Kelly 🇺🇸 (@julie_kelly2) April 16, 2025
White House director of communications Steven Cheung posted on X in response to Boasberg’s Wednesday order, “We plan to seek immediate appellate relief.”
We plan to seek immediate appellate relief. The President is 100% committed to ensuring that terrorists and criminal illegal migrants are no longer a threat to Americans and their communities across the country. https://t.co/Qc8SyOzPOj
— Steven Cheung (@StevenCheung47) April 16, 2025
He concluded, “The President is 100% committed to ensuring that terrorists and criminal illegal migrants are no longer a threat to Americans and their communities across the country.”
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