On Thursday, a hearing took place concerning whether or not President Trump’s administration defied DC District Judge James Boasberg’s spoken order to “turn the planes around” carrying Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang members to El Salvador, part of an agreement Trump had made with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele.
The decision on that will likely come down sometime next week — the next hearing is set for next Tuesday — and one possible, outrageous outcome is that Trump’s administration will be held in contempt of court. Sad to say, we won’t be surprised if that travesty actually happens, because the presiding judge at the hearing was, of course, Judge Boasberg.
Yes, he’s the one who gets to decide. And he made it clear during Thursday’s hearing that if he finds “probable cause” to believe the administration deliberately defied his March 15 order to turn the planes around, contempt of court charges are on the table. He gives every indication of already believing they defied him, so it’ll be up to administration attorneys to change his mind. Good luck with that.
The Trump administration has already appealed the deportation case to the Supreme Court, but Judge Boasberg apparently can’t wait for SCOTUS to issue their own ruling without more of his involvement. Thus, these hearings and threats of “contempt.” We don’t throw around terms like “God Complex” lightly but have rarely seen a judge try to play God like this. (Well, there was Merchan…)
As reported Thursday by FOX News, “At issue is the administration’s use of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelan nationals, including alleged members of the violent Tren de Aragua gang. Judge Boasberg pressed Deputy Assistant Attorney General Drew Ensign on why the government appeared to ignore an emergency injunction last month halting those deportations.”
Boasberg made it clear through the questioning that he’d already made up his mind…
Boasberg: “You maintain the government was in full compliance with the court’s order on March 15, correct?”
Ensign: (Yes.)
Boasberg: “It seems to me the government acted in bad faith that day. If you really believed that day that everything you did was legal and would survive a court challenge, you would not have operated the way that you did.”
From FOX News: “The judge pressed the lawyer over the names, locations and agencies of individuals who were privy to the removals, as well as internal conversations with other administration officials who may have been listening in to the court proceedings.”
Boasberg also drilled down on the flights themselves and whether or not information was classified, which might have triggered “state secrets” protection. Government attorneys have not shared information with him about these flights, citing national security protections. The amazing thing is that this line of questioning about national security issues, as forced by a district court judge, is going on at all.
The questioning got bizarre, with Boasberg asking, “Who did you tell about my order? Once the hearing was done, who did you tell?”
Ensign told the judge he’d passed the information to contacts at the Department of Homeland Security and State Department, among others. Boasberg was very interested in the specific names of those who had been told about this, writing them down on a pad and even asking for the correct spelling and their job titles.
There is something so unseemly about Judge Boasberg’s behavior here that, although arguments can be made on both sides concerning his impeachment (which President Trump has called for), he seems intent on making himself more impeachment-worthy by the day.
The no-nonsense Tom Homan — Trump’s “border czar,” who actually does his JOB — put his mission in black-and-white on Monday, saying they weren’t defying court orders but that “I don’t care what that judge thinks as far as this case; we’re gonna continue to arrest public safety threats and national security threats. We’re gonna continue to deport them from the United States. The Venezuelans who’ve been deported, “every single one, according to the information given to me from the field, are members of the TdA, and TdA’s been determined to be a terrorist organization, they are now classified as terrorists, and that plane removed 240 terrorists from the United States.”
Here’s a similarly no-nonsense approach taken by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich on Tuesday during a joint congressional subcommittee hearing on “Judicial Overreach and Constitutional Limits on the Federal Courts”:
“This issue of district judges becoming alternative presidents and issuing nationwide injunctions and such, central point to where we are – if we can limit the judges, we would send such a strong signal of rebalancing the Constitution that I think it will sober up everybody on the judicial side.” In other words, the legislature first needs to take steps to solve “the immediate problem” — to restore the effectiveness of the Executive Branch and send a “powerful rebuke” to judges that, Gingrich says, stops them from overreaching.
Jim Hoft at Gateway Pundit puts this latest Judge Boasberg story in far more personal terms, saying that Boasberg is “running a coup-d’état of the executive branch” with his threats of contempt charges. As Hoft points out, Boasberg is just one of dozens of far-left judges who are “running a legal insurrection…as the GOP and U.S. House and Senate stand by and suck their thumbs.”
“Boasberg believes that he is in charge of the executive branch and that he can import killers, rapists, and illegal aliens into the U.S. homeland,” Hoft says. “And, so far, he’s right! There is no one pushing back on these criminal judges as they destroy America.”
As Julie Kelly said in March, “What he did in ordering planes back, setting a contempt trap, and unnecessarily burdening top DOJ officials to try to undermine foreign policy — if Boasberg is reversed, it should result in impeachment hearings.”
A non-governmental organization (NGO) called the Acacia Center for Justice, which received $200 million in federal contracts from the Biden administration to provide free legal aid to unaccompanied alien children (UACs), saw its funding cut by President Trump in February. That didn’t sit well with Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin, a Biden appointee to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California who happens to have been born in Mexico City (making us wonder if there might have been some judge-shopping going on). Late Tuesday, she issued a temporary restraining order (TRO) blocking Trump from defunding this group, citing “irreparable harm” and the need to promote “efficiency and fairness within the immigration system.”
Judge Martinez-Olguin goes waaaaay back with the immigration issue. In this document from 2013, we see that before becoming a judge, she was working for the ACLU as a senior staff attorney in the Immigrants’ Rights Project (IRP) and seems to have specialized in that field even before then. Read her bio from that time, and you might wonder yourself about the likelihood of judge- and/or venue-shopping.
If that doesn’t make you wonder, then try this recent update, from 2022. “Martinez-Olguin has dedicated her legal career to protecting the civil rights of immigrant workers,” it says, and she sure has. Read this, and you will see: the plaintiffs in this case against Trump could not possibly have found a more sympathetic judge if they’d scoured the whole country (and maybe they did).
There’s sure to be more soon about DOGE’s findings about this group’s flow of cash that led President Trump to turn off the spigot. And surely his administration will appeal this judge’s ruling. Sorry to say, with as many government staffers as they’re cutting, it seems they’ll have to keep hiring more and more attorneys.
We wonder if some other judge is going to try to block Trump’s firing of several staffers from the National Security Council. Can’t pin down the details yet — there’s some discrepancy — but The Daily Caller has this…
Speaking of biased judges, here’s something about Chief Justice John Roberts that won’t do his hoped-for image as a non-political judge any good. (As if that image weren’t already shot.) He seems to have spent quite a lot of friendly time with, of all people, anti-Trump hoaxer and Democrat attorney Norm Eisen, and their relationship goes back a long way. Roberts even spent a week at Eisen’s palatial home (150 rooms??) in Prague while Eisen was ambassador to the Czech Republic under Obama. Roberts was already Chief Justice then. The two worked together, Eisen himself said in an interview, “on American and European rule-of-law issues.”
Mike Benz posted some great commentary on just what that means, relating it to what U.S. judges are doing right now to use “the rule of law” to nullify everything Trump does. Benz concluded, “I want every single one of these ‘rule-of-law’ programs completely declassified.” And he’s working on that
And from The Researcher, who deserves credit for discovering the Eisman quote on a podcast called “Pantsuit Politics” (apparently a reference to Hillary): “John should resign or recuse himself from all of the lawsuit cases that Norm and his partners have filed that are working their way to the SC. Talk about a conflict of interest.”
If you’re not too familiar with Norm Eisen, here’s an enlightening piece from Revolver News from September 2020, quite long and detailed, about Eisen and others as Color Revolution experts and “regime change professionals,” and not just in foreign countries. We almost certainly linked to this piece when it came out, but it’s still a must-read in today’s context. Please set aside some time, or read it in a few installments, and your eyes will be opened. The Chief Justice shouldn’t be anywhere NEAR these political operatives..
