A judge on Wednesday found probable cause to hold Trump administration officials in criminal contempt, saying they violated his orders last month by not returning planes of Venezuelan migrants whom the administration rushed to deport on March 15.
“The Court does not reach such conclusion lightly or hastily; indeed, it has given Defendants ample opportunity to rectify or explain their actions. None of their responses has been satisfactory,” U.S. District Judge James Boasberg wrote in an order.
Boasberg, an Obama appointee, said the Trump administration could attempt to take corrective action to erase the contempt finding by April 23. The judge said an “obvious” way to do this would be for the government to “[assert] custody” over the deportees, whom the administration alleges are members of Tren de Aragua and who are currently detained in a Salvadoran prison, and allow them to take advantage of their right to due process by challenging their deportations in the appropriate U.S. courts.
Boasberg noted that the government would “not need to release any of those individuals, nor would it need to transport them back to the homeland” if it wanted to take up that option. He also said he was open to hearing other remedies for the contempt.
The judge said that if the administration decided not to attempt to correct, or “purge,” the contempt charge, then he would need the names of the specific people in the administration who made the decisions to violate his orders.
At the center of the contempt finding are Boasberg’s orders on March 15, which involved a written and verbal order that temporarily paused President Donald Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act and ordered the administration to return the migrants who were deported under it so that he could assess whether the deportations were lawful.
The Supreme Court later tossed out Boasberg’s order, but Boasberg said that “does not excuse the government’s violation.”
The judge also chided the administration for touting the deportations on X the day after they took place, highlighting Secretary of State Marco Rubio sharing Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele joking about how the administration had, in Boasberg’s view, defied his orders.
SUPREME COURT LIFTS ORDER AGAINST TRUMP USING WARTIME LAW FOR DEPORTATIONS
“Worse, boasts by Defendants intimated that they had defied the Court’s Order deliberately and gleefully,” Boasberg wrote. “The Secretary of State, for instance, retweeted a post in which, above a news headline noting this Court’s Order to return the flights to the United States, the President of El Salvador wrote: “Oopsie . . . Too late [laughing emojis].”
The Washington Examiner reached out to the Department of Justice for comment.
