The judge refrained from issuing a ruling on whether the administration had defied his order stopping deportations of alleged foreign criminal gang members.
WASHINGTON—U.S. District Judge James Boasberg has ordered President Donald Trump’s administration to provide additional information on its implementation of the president’s decision to speed up deportations of purported Venezuelan gang members by applying a centuries-old law known as the Alien Enemies Act.
The order came alongside a March 17 hearing in which Boasberg scrutinized whether the administration had complied with an order he issued two days beforehand that prohibited deportations authorized by Trump’s March 15
proclamation, which invoked the Enemies Act. A group of anonymous Venezuelan nationals sued in anticipation of the proclamation and later alleged that the administration had flouted Boasberg’s March 15 order.
Boasberg requested that the administration provide, by noon on March 18, sworn declarations of the government’s estimate of how many individuals subject to Trump’s proclamation were still in the country, clarifying when the proclamation was signed and went into effect, and stating that no individuals were removed pursuant to the declaration after Boasberg issued a written order at 7:25 p.m. E.T. on March 15.
The administration had attempted to prevent the March 17 hearing from taking place. In a
motion filed before the hearing, the Department of Justice (DOJ) said the court should “de-escalate the grave incursions on Executive Branch authority that have already arisen.”
Boasberg denied the motion and suggested during the hearing that the DOJ was underestimating his authority over deportations that had extended beyond U.S. airspace. He also refrained from issuing a ruling on whether the government had defied his order.
The dispute arose in response to Trump’s
proclamation that targeted members of the Tren de Aragua (TdA) gang, which the State Department designated as a foreign terrorist organization in the preceding month. Trump accused the gang of “perpetrating, attempting, and threatening an invasion or predatory incursion of the United States” and proclaimed that all gang members older than 14 years of age were liable to be removed as alien enemies.
The DOJ said in a March 16
notice that it complied with an initial temporary restraining order issued by Boasberg that prohibited the administration from removing the five plaintiffs in the case. The department stated that Boasberg’s later broader order, which expanded the block to all those who are covered by Trump’s proclamation, came after some foreign gang members had already been removed.
The administration has filed appeals of both orders in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
On March 17, the plaintiffs
indicated the administration wrongly focused on a written order that was issued after 7 p.m. rather than a preceding oral order that Boasberg issued around 6:45 p.m. ET. They said the DOJ’s filing contained phrasing that suggested “the government has chosen to treat this court’s order as applying only to individuals still on U.S. soil or on flights that had yet to clear U.S. airspace as of 7:26 p.m. (the time of the written Order).”
Their filing stated that two flights appeared to take off during the hearing on March 15 but landed after the court’s written order, “meaning the defendants could have turned the plane around without handing over individuals subject to the proclamation and this court’s [temporary restraining order].”
They pointed to how, during the March 15 hearing, Boasberg said that any plane that was in the air needed to be returned. “That oral order of course carries no less weight than the court’s written order,” their brief read.
In its motion to vacate the March 17 hearing, DOJ responded to the plaintiffs by arguing that they were wrongly focused on the judge’s oral order rather than the narrower written order, which was issued less than an hour later. It added that an oral directive was not enforceable as an injunction.
DOJ added that for “any flights that were already outside U.S. territory and airspace, anyone aboard had already been ‘removed’ within the meaning of the Alien Enemies Act and the court’s order, and therefore were not covered by the order.”
