President Donald Trump on Monday claimed the chief judge of the federal trial court in the nation’s capital lacks the authority to review whether his administration’s attempt to bypass due process protections when deporting migrants who are alleged to be gang members and called for the judge to be impeached.
In a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump inveighed against U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, the current head of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, in response to Boasberg pressing Department of Justice attorneys on whether government had violated a weekend order he issued to halt efforts to deport more than 200 people under the purported authority of a centuries-old law that allows the president to remove aliens from countries with which the United States is at war.
“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,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
“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 tirade against Boasberg comes after the federal judge held an emergency hearing on Monday to inquire as to whether the government had disobeyed a Saturday evening emergency order barring deportation of any Venezuelan national targeted under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, which Trump invoked late last week by claiming the country was under an “invasion” by Tren de Aragua, a criminal gang which the administration has declared to be a foreign terrorist organization linked to the Venezuelan government.
Boasberg’s order directed the administration not to remove anyone from the country using the authority laid out in a declaration invoking the 1798 law after a group of Venezuelan nationals filed suit. The government has not deported those five named plaintiffs, but planes carrying roughly 250 others who were accused of being members of Tren de Aragua left airports in Texas during a Saturday evening hearing shortly before Boasberg had issued the order.
On Monday at a second hearing demanded by Boasberg, the jurist reportedly became irate when the government insisted that they had urgent national security reasons for keeping the planes in the air instead of turning them around as ordered.
“Any plane that you put into the air in or around that time, you knew that I was having a hearing at 5,” the judge said, according to reports.
He also pressed government attorneys on what happened during an interval between when he orally ordered the administration to “immediately” return any plane carrying deportees under the Alien Enemies Act to the U.S. and a written order with less specific terms being issued on the court docket.
Abhishek Kambli, the Deputy Associate Attorney General who was representing the government during the hearing, maintained that Judge Boasberg’s oral directions had no legal force.
“We believe that there was no order given … an injunction is not ordered until it’s in the written filing,” he said.
Boasberg replied that the prosecutor’s contention was “a heck of a stretch” while rejecting claims that the planes weren’t under his jurisdiction because they’d crossed into international airspace.
“It’s not a question that the plane was or was not in United States airspace,” he said, because federal courts’ jurisdiction does not “lapse at the water’s edge” or “the airspace’s edge.”
More follows…
