A federal judge has ruled that there is “probable cause” to hold the Trump administration in contempt over its removal of hundreds of migrants from the United States to a notorious prison in El Salvador despite an order to halt their deportation.
On Wednesday, D.C. U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg ruled that the Trump administration’s “willful and knowing” actions — and their stonewalling during subsequent hearings — constitute “probable cause for a finding of contempt.”
Last month, the Trump administration attempted to stealthily deport over 200 Venezuelan and Salvadoran migrants to El Salvador under the supposed authority of the Alien Enemies Act (AEA) — an 18th century law that allows the president to deport citizens of a hostile nation with little due process. Trump’s order authorizing the use of the AEA was signed on March 14, with no public announcement. The American Civil Liberties Union had already filed a class action lawsuit in anticipation of Trump’s invocation of AEA. Boesberg issued a verbal and later a written temporary restraining order blocking the deportation of the migrants, one that — according to the timeline of events — administration officials may have ignored.
In his Wednesday decision, Boasberg wrote: “Defendants do not dispute that, if the Order indeed proscribed transferring class members out of U.S. custody, they plainly violated it hours after it was issued. Rather than mount any factual defense, they rely on post-hoc legal arguments to attack the validity of the Order itself […] As previously explained, per the collateral-bar rule, what matters is whether they violated the terms of the Order, not whether the Order itself was legally valid.”
Boasberg noted that his oral order to halt the deportation flights was just as binding as the written version of the order issued shortly after, and that disregarding it was in itself grounds for a finding of contempt. “Indeed, consider the absurd mischief that Defendants’ position would
license: if an oral command is not binding for purposes of contempt unless or until memorialized in a written Order, the enjoined party could race to accomplish the plainly proscribed act before the court could put pen to paper,” he wrote Wednesday.
The judge has also allowed the Trump administration one last opportunity to skirt contempt charges by complying with the court’s rulings. “The most obvious way for Defendants to do so here is by asserting custody of the individuals who were removed in violation of the Court’s classwide TRO so that they might avail themselves of their right to challenge their removability through a habeas proceeding,” he wrote. “In the event that Defendants do not choose to purge their contempt, the Court will proceed to identify the individual(s) responsible for the contumacious conduct by determining whose ‘specific act or omission’ caused the noncompliance.”
In other words, give the migrants sent to a foreign gulag the relief and rights they were entitled to in the first place — or be prepared to find yourself as a defendant.
