Justice Department lawyers representing the Trump administration were defiant in a federal court hearing Monday, declining to answer several of the judge’s questions and otherwise defending the administration’s conduct after immigration authorities appear to have violated the judge’s order.
The hearing concerned U.S. District Judge James Boasberg’s verbal order Saturday that planes being used to deport people under the Alien Enemies Act, a rarely used wartime power, be immediately returned to the United States.
The administration attorneys asserted they did not refuse to comply — even as they acknowledged ignoring a verbal order from the court.
On Saturday, the administration allowed multiple planes to land in El Salvador — the president of which has promised to throw deportees into a notoriously brutal supermax prison — hours after Boasberg issued an order pausing the deportations. In court on Saturday, the judge said, “This is something that you need to make sure is complied with immediately.”
At Monday’s hearing, administration lawyers said they didn’t consider the judge’s verbal order to be operative — and argued that a written, paragraph-long “minute order” later entered in the court docket superseded it. The minute order didn’t mention turning planes around.
That’s a heck of a stretch,” replied Boasberg, the chief judge in the federal district court in D.C., after a Justice Department lawyer confirmed that the administration believed it could disregard his verbal order. (Verbal orders are, in fact, judicial orders.)
The Justice Department lawyers, Abhishek Kambli and August Flentje, also argued that Trump’s “inherent authority” regarding foreign policy and military decisions trumped the judge’s authority once the planes left the United States, even though Boasberg’s verbal order had addressed planes that were “in the air.”
Boasberg countered that his own authority did not end “at the airspace’s edge.”
Lee Gelernt, an ACLU attorney who addressed the court, said the question of the extent of Trump’s powers was a question for the appeals process, and that the administration’s claims about Trump’s power “gives them no basis for simply not complying with the order” from the district court judge.
Kambli and Flentje refused to answer some of the judge’s questions, saying they were “not at liberty” to discuss “operational issues” such as how many planes departed the United States Saturday carrying deportees who were subject to the president’s Alien Enemies Act invocation.
