The Trump administration has asked a federal judge to dissolve the orders he put in place this weekend barring it from deporting people suspected of belonging to a Venezuelan street gang from the country under a rarely invoked wartime statute called the Alien Enemies Act.
The Justice Department also doubled down on its efforts to avoid giving the judge, James E. Boasberg, the detailed information he had requested about the deportations. It complied — but only in part — with his instructions to provide specific data about when two flights, with the people accused of being gang members, took off from the United States for El Salvador.
Taken together, the twin moves — made in separate sets of court papers filed on Monday and Tuesday — marked a continuation of the Trump’s administration’s aggressive attempts to push back against Judge Boasberg, the chief judge of the Federal District Court in Washington, who temporarily halted one of President Trump’s signature deportation policies.
The Justice Department has now effectively opened up two fronts in the battle: one challenging the underlying orders that paused, for now, the deportation flights altogether and another seeking to avoid disclosing any information about two flights this weekend that could indicate they took place after the judge’s orders stopping them were imposed.
In court papers filed on Tuesday, lawyers for the Justice Department asserted, as they already have in court, that the two flights left the United States with immigrants removed under the Alien Enemies Act before a written order by Judge Boasberg, was formally placed on the docket at 7:25 p.m. on Saturday.
But the lawyers refused — again — to tell the judge precisely when the flights took off, leaving unanswered the question of whether they departed after he had issued a similar oral ruling seeking to stop them at about 6:45 p.m. that day.
The department lawyers said that providing such details about timing would be “inappropriate” because they claim that the administration had not violated the judge’s order. At the same time, the lawyers said that if Judge Boasberg wanted more information, they would provide it a private setting.
Judge Boasberg on Tuesday ordered the Justice Department to send him a sealed declaration by Wednesday at noon detailing the times the planes took off, left U.S. airspace and landed.
All of this played out even as Mr. Trump himself attacked Judge Boasberg on social media on Tuesday morning as “a troublemaker and agitator,” and called for his impeachment. The various legal moves also followed a day of extraordinary tension between the Trump administration and Judge Boasberg, both inside and outside the courtroom.
At a hearing in Washington on Monday, a Justice Department lawyer tested the judge’s authority and patience by flatly refusing to provide any details about the timing of the flights that removed dozens of people suspected of being members of the Tren de Aragua gang.
Citing “national security” concerns, the lawyer, Abhishek Kambli, said the only thing he could give Judge Boasberg was his assurance that the flights had occurred before a written version of his directive stopping them was formally entered onto the docket.
In an even bolder move on Monday afternoon, the Justice Department asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to remove Judge Boasberg from the case, citing the “highly unusual and improper procedures” he has used. That effort was preceded by another act of defiance as the administration sought to have the court hearing canceled altogether less than two hours before it was supposed to begin.
In court papers filed late Monday, lawyers for the Justice Department kept up the pressure on Judge Boasberg, accusing him of “judicial micromanagement.” The papers asked the federal appeals court that sits above Judge Boasberg to freeze the case before the government had to disclose any “national security information” about the deportation flights.
Early Tuesday morning, lawyers for five of the people accused of being gang members fired back, telling the appeals court that Judge Boasberg had bent over backward to accommodate the government’s concerns by offering to consider any sensitive or secret information in a classified facility.
The lawyers also suggested that the government was simply trying to avoid being held accountable for having potentially violated the judge’s rulings.
“If the government’s position is that it will not under any circumstances disclose to the court highly relevant information regarding whether it deliberately violated a federal court order, there is no good reason why it should not explain why it believes its position is lawful,” the lawyers wrote.
The back and forth between the two sides came as some people in the United States and Venezuela have claimed that their relatives were included the rapid deportations, despite lacking any criminal record.
In one of its recent filings to Judge Boasberg, the Justice Department quoted a federal immigration officer who oversaw the removals of several people suspected of belonging to Tren de Aragua and acknowledged that many of those deported did not have criminal records in the United States.
Others were in proximity to Tren de Aragua members during law enforcement raids and were arrested, according to the immigration officer Robert L. Cerna II, the acting field office director of the deportation arm of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. But it remains unclear how the federal government assessed each deportee’s gang affiliation.
The White House has said that more than 130 gang members were removed through the wartime authority of the Alien Enemies Act and that an additional 101 were Venezuelans deported under typical immigration proceedings that grants some due process. Another 23 were members of the Salvadoran gang Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, according to the White House.
Even as the Justice Department pushed back on Judge Boasberg’s efforts to learn more about deportation flights, department lawyers also asked him to dissolve the temporary restraining orders that had started the entire squabble.
The first of those orders, both of which were issued at a hastily convened Zoom hearing on Saturday evening, barred the Trump administration from removing from the country any of the five people accused of being gang members who filed the underlying case. Judge Boasberg then issued a second, more expansive order, saying that no one suspected of being an Tren de Aragua member could be expelled under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.
In seeking to dissolve the orders, Justice Department lawyers argued that Judge Boasberg had no authority to issue them in the first place because “the presidential actions they challenge are not subject to judicial review.”
The lawyers also claimed that Mr. Trump’s decision to deport the people suspected of membership in Tren de Aragua — which was recently designated as a foreign terrorist organization — was lawful under the Alien Enemies Act. The statute allows the government during an invasion or a time of war to round up and summarily remove any “subjects of the hostile nation or government” who are over the age of 14 from the United States as “alien enemies.”
The administration has repeatedly claimed that those accused of gang membership should be considered subjects of a hostile nation because they are closely aligned with the Venezuelan government and the leadership of the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro. The White House has also insisted that the arrival to the United States of dozens of Tren de Aragua members constitutes an invasion. But many of those arguments are likely to face tough scrutiny as the case moves forward.
