The federal judge who blocked Donald Trump’s deportation flights under the Alien Enemies Act appeared taken aback by arguments from Department of Justice lawyers claiming that his order from the bench could be ignored because it wasn’t written down.
“You’re telling me you felt you could disregard it because it wasn’t in the written order?” an incredulous U.S. District Judge James Boasberg asked during a hearing in Washington, D.C. Monday.
Justice Department lawyers suggested that was the position of the Trump administration. He called the government’s argument a “heckuva stretch.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt also appeared to make a similar argument to reporters during a briefing earlier Monday.
“There are actually questions about whether a verbal order carries the same weight as a written order,” she claimed.
The judge called a hearing to determine what exactly happened after three flights allegedly containing members of Venezuela’s Tren de Agua gang left the United States for El Salvador on Friday night despite his verbal — and written — orders that expressly blocked them from taking off.
A timeline is crucial to determine whether the administration is openly defying the judicial branch as critics fear the president is consolidating power in the executive branch and shredding checks and balances.
After Boasberg refused the Trump administration’s request to cancel Monday’s hearing, the Justice Department asked a federal appeals court to “immediately” remove the case from Boasberg’s courtroom.
“The administration really jumped the shark with this,” Katherine Yon Ebright of the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University Law School said Monday of the Justice Department’s attempt to take the case away from Boasberg.
“Judge Boasberg is no bleeding-heart liberal or national security law skeptic; he’s the former presiding judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court,” she wrote.
The immigrants on those flights are now jailed in a notorious El Salvadoran prison. The White House claims officials can prove they are gang members based on “intelligence and men and women on the ground,” Leavitt told reporters Monday.
“Their hands were tied under the previous administration … they should be trusted and respected by the American public with this operation,” she said.
Judge Boasberg ordered attorneys to answer a series of questions about the flights, including, critically, what time they left the United States. But Justice Department lawyers repeatedly refused to answer the the queries.
The judge also wants to know how many people were deported solely on the basis of Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act, the centuries-old wartime law that Trump has applied for the fourth time in U.S. history.
