We start the week with a question that has arisen in multiple cases just a couple of months in to Donald Trump’s second term: Did his administration violate a court order?
The latest iteration of the question comes in litigation that developed quickly over the weekend, after Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act to summarily deport people who the administration said are members of a transnational gang called Tren de Aragua.
The American Civil Liberties Union sued, and on Saturday, the chief federal trial judge in Washington, D.C., ordered the government not to remove people pursuant to Trump’s proclamation. The government is appealing Judge James Boasberg’s temporary restraining orders, and litigation will proceed in the D.C. federal appeals court this week as the Trump administration seeks to upend them.
But in the meantime, the ACLU told Boasberg in a court filing early Monday that “media reports and publicly available data” suggest that the government defendants “may have violated the Court’s Orders.” The plaintiffs asked the judge to “seek immediate clarification from Defendants, in one or more sworn declarations, about their conduct regarding this Court’s Orders.”
The plaintiffs noted that Boasberg had told the government to turn around any planes carrying people pursuant to the proclamation, and they questioned the government’s compliance with that mandate, suggesting that officials had played fast and loose with the judge’s directives. To get to the bottom of the matter, the plaintiffs want sworn declarations from the government on the following points:
1) whether any flight with individuals subject to the Proclamation took off after either the Court’s written or oral Orders were issued;
2) whether any flight with individuals subject to the Proclamation landed after either the Court’s written or oral Orders were issued;
3) whether any flight with individuals subject to the Proclamation was still in the air after either the Court’s written or oral Orders were issued; and
4) whether custody of any individuals subject to the Proclamation was transferred to a foreign country after either the Court’s written or oral Orders were issued. To be sure, this is not the first case in which opposing parties have questioned the nascent administration’s legal compliance. To take another example in pending litigation, the plaintiffs in the foreign aid funding case that was at the Supreme Court and is back in the trial court are still casting doubt on Trump officials’ compliance there. As for this latest situation involving flights over the weekend, we could learn soon whether Boasberg himself thinks the government defied his orders. On Monday morning, after the ACLU submitted its filing, he ordered a same-day 5 p.m. ET hearing at which the government “shall be prepared to provide answers” to the questions raised by the plaintiffs. Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in the Trump administration’s legal cases.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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