The Trump Administration Won’t Stop Giving a Middle Finger to Judges

Judge James Boasberg was looking for answers. He was holding a court hearing on the Trump administration’s decision to defy his verbal order to halt the deportation flights of alleged Venezuelan gang members, which the president executed Friday under a 200-year-old war powers law. “You’re telling me you felt you could disregard it because it wasn’t in the written order?” Boasberg asked an attorney for the Justice Department.

Yes, the administration replied—and then some.

Not only did DOJ lawyer Abhishek Kambli advance the bizarre arguments that the judge’s decree “lost jurisdiction” when the two planes were out of United States airspace and that the order had to be in writing—a “heck of a stretch,” Boasberg said. Administration officials continued to challenge the basic authority of the judicial branch to check that of the executive branch—seeking, in no uncertain terms, to give Donald Trump practically unlimited power.

“That is not something that a district court judge has any authority whatsoever to interfere with, to enjoin, to restrict, or to restrain in any way,” Stephen Miller—a driving force behind Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act of 1789 over the weekend to expel alleged members of the Tren de Aragua gang to El Salvador—claimed in a CNN interview Monday.

That’s a radical and dangerous view of executive authority, one in which the presidency is unencumbered by the separation of powers and therefore unaccountable to the law and to the public. But it’s one currently being put forth by the rest of the Trump administration. Pam Bondi, the attorney general, said Boasberg’s order to block the deportations was an “intrusion on the president’s authority” and vowed to forge ahead, regardless of what the judge ruled. “We will continue to follow the Alien Enemies Act,” Bondi told Fox News’ Jeanine Pirro.

Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, was even more blunt: “We’re not stopping,” he said on Fox & Friends Monday morning. “I don’t care what the judges think. I don’t care what the left thinks. We’re coming.”

The administration’s position, it seems, is that it will do whatever it pleases—and if some federal judge tries to stop it, so what? Who will make Trump follow Boasberg’s order? Congressional Republicans? They’ve already surrendered the power of the purse to Trump’s unelected henchman, Elon Musk, and made clear that they will enable—not curb—this administration. It would seem more likely that a GOP effort to impeach Boasberg would gain more steam than an effort to get Trump to comply with his decisions.

The Supreme Court may eventually have to weigh in; Trump himself expressed his desire over the weekend for the high court, where three of his own appointees sit, to rule on lower courts’ authority to rein him in. The 6-3 conservative majority would not be guaranteed to side with him; one can imagine John Roberts or Amy Coney Barrett at least deciding that the power of their own branch of government is worth preserving. But it is also not guaranteed that the Trump administration would respect an unfavorable ruling. In flagrantly defying court orders, Trump and his officials are going into uncharted political territory, where nothing can be assumed or taken for granted. The DOJ did not have any sound answers for Boasberg Monday to justify blowing off his order. What’s scary is that it might not matter.