CNN
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A federal judge will come face-to-face with Justice Department attorneys Friday in the wake of President Donald Trump’s call for his impeachment over how the jurist has handled a challenge to Trump’s use of a sweeping wartime authority to quickly deport some noncitizens.
The hearing before US District Judge James Boasberg comes as the he navigates a high-profile showdown with the administration over his orders last weekend that temporarily blocked Trump’s ability to use the Alien Enemies Act – and probes whether the administration immediately flouted those rulings with deportation flights Saturday night.
Boasberg, an appointee of former President Barack Obama and the chief judge of the trial-level court in Washington, DC, has become emblematic of the scores of district court judges who have frustrated – even on a temporary basis – Trump’s agenda during the opening months of his second term.
Earlier this week, Trump even echoed calls for Boasberg’s impeachment, prompting a rare rebuke from Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts on the threat.
Boasberg’s frustration with the department spilled further into open view on Thursday after he lambasted it for giving him “woefully insufficient” information in response to his request for more details about the deportations in question.
“The Government again evaded its obligations,” the judge wrote. He went on to criticize DOJ for giving him a sworn statement by an official with ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations who “repeated the same general information about the flights” and went on to say that Cabinet secretaries “‘are currently actively considering whether to invoke the state secrets privilege over the other facts requested by the Court’s order.’”
“The Government cannot proffer a regional ICE official to attest to Cabinet-level discussions of the state-secrets privilege; indeed, his declaration on that point, not surprisingly, is based solely on his unsubstantiated ‘understand[ing],’” he added.
Critically, Boasberg, in an escalation of the standoff with DOJ, ordered its attorneys to “show cause” as to how two deportation flights it allowed to continue last Saturday did not violate orders he issued that day temporarily blocking Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act to quickly deport individuals the government has accused of being affiliated with the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.
The judge had ordered all planes carrying migrants being deported under the act to turn around immediately pending a legal challenge brought the American Civil Liberties Union and others to Trump’s use of the 18th century law.
But the ACLU lawyers quickly accused the administration of flouting his commands. The Justice Department has repeatedly insisted it did not violate the orders last weekend.
“There’s been a lot of talk over the last seven weeks about constitutional crisis. People are throwing that term around. I think we are getting very close to it,” ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt told Boasberg earlier this week.
The Justice Department has already appealed Boasberg’s temporary restraining orders to the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, but they’ve also asked the judge to completely wipe them away – a request he’s hearing arguments over during the Friday afternoon hearing.
On TV and social media as well as in court papers, Trump administration officials have pushed a range of arguments for why they believe the judge exceeded his authority in issuing the orders, including that Trump’s use of AEA is shielded from any review by federal courts.
“We have one unelected federal judge trying to control foreign policies, trying to control the Alien Enemies Act, which they have no business presiding over. And there are 261 reasons why Americans are safer now – that’s because those people are out of this country,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said Wednesday on Fox News.
Boasberg, Bondi maintained, is symbolic of the Trump administration’s defeats in court.
“This has been a pattern with these liberal judges,” she said. “This judge had no right to do that. They are meddling in foreign affairs, they are meddling in our government, and the question should be why is a judge trying to protect terrorists who have invaded our country over American citizens.”
