A federal judge in Washington threatened on Wednesday to open a high-stakes contempt investigation into whether the Trump administration violated an order he issued last month directing officials to stop planes of Venezuelan migrants from being sent to El Salvador.
In a 46-page ruling, the judge, James E. Boasberg, said that he would begin contempt proceedings against the administration unless the White House did what it has failed to do for more than a month: give scores of Venezuelan men deported El Salvador under the expansive authority of a wartime law called the Alien Enemies Act a chance to challenge their removal.
“The court does not reach such conclusions lightly or hastily,” wrote Judge Boasberg, who sits as the chief judge in Federal District Court in Washington. “Indeed, it has given defendants ample opportunity to explain their actions. None of their responses has been satisfactory.”
Judge Boasberg’s threat of contempt proceedings came one day after another federal judge, in another case involving the deportation flights to El Salvador, announced that she was beginning her own inquiry into whether the White House had violated a separate ruling by the Supreme Court.
In that case, Judge Paula Xinis, who sits in Federal District Court in Maryland, ordered the administration within the next two weeks to answer questions — both in writing and in depositions — about why it had so far apparently failed to comply with directions from the Supreme Court to “facilitate” the release of a Maryland man, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, from the same Salvadoran prison to which the Venezuelan migrants had been sent.
Taken together, the twin decisions by the judges represented a remarkable attempt by jurists to hold the White House accountable not only for its apparent willingness to flout court orders, but also more broadly its inclination to probe the traditional, but increasingly fragile, balance of power between the executive and judicial branches.
Alan Feuer covers extremism and political violence for The Times, focusing on the criminal cases involving the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and against former President Donald J. Trump.
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