A federal appeals court in Washington on Friday temporarily put on hold a looming contempt investigation into whether the Trump administration willfully violated a judge’s order directing officials to stop flights of Venezuelan immigrants from being sent to El Salvador in March.
The single-page decision by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia came in response to a belligerently worded request by the Justice Department asking the court to shut down the inquiry.
The appellate panel’s ruling gave no hint about how it may ultimately handle the high-stakes contempt proceeding. But it would almost certainly grant the administration a reprieve from having one of its top immigration lawyers have to take the witness stand next week and answer questions about his role in conveying to senior officials the order by the judge, James E. Boasberg, to stop the deportation flights.
The Justice Department’s request to the appeals court earlier on Friday was merely the latest flashpoint between the administration and the courts — especially over the contentious subject of President Trump’s aggressive immigration agenda.
The filing had harsh words for Judge Boasberg’s pending contempt proceeding, calling it “an idiosyncratic and misguided inquiry” that “portends a circus.” It was also remarkably antagonistic to the judge himself, making the highly unusual request that the case be stripped from him altogether because he had “developed too strong a bias to preside over this matter impartially.”
Judge Boasberg fired back within hours in his own forceful ruling, saying that the proceeding should go on.
“This inquiry is not some academic exercise,” he wrote. “Approximately 137 men were spirited out of this country without a hearing and placed in a high-security prison in El Salvador, where many suffered abuse and possible torture, despite this court’s order that they should not be disembarked.”
The Justice Department’s request to the appeals court was not the first time it had sought to involve appellate judges in derailing Judge Boasberg’s contempt investigation.
In April, department lawyers persuaded a similar three-judge panel of the court to put off the inquiry as it considered the investigation’s viability. But in November, after months of deliberation, the full appeals court permitted Judge Boasberg to move forward.
He wasted no time in ordering testimony from Drew Ensign, a Justice Department lawyer who had informed administration officials about his order on March 15 to stop the flights of immigrants from going to El Salvador and to turn around any planes that were already in the air.
Judge Boasberg said he also wanted to hear from Erez Reuveni, one of Mr. Ensign’s former colleagues who filed an explosive whistle-blower complaint about the case after he was fired by the department in a related proceeding. In his complaint, Mr. Reuveni accused Emil Bove III, who was then in a senior role at the Justice Department, of telling his subordinates in profane language that they might need to consider ignoring court orders demanding that the deportation flights be halted.
Those flights were part of an early effort by the White House to send scores of Venezuelan men accused of being members of the violent street gang Tren de Aragua to a notorious prison in El Salvador under the expansive authority of a wartime law passed more than two centuries ago. The law, known as the Alien Enemies Act, gives the president sweeping powers to detain and deport members of a hostile foreign nation in a time of war or during an invasion of the country.
The question of whether Mr. Trump used the act properly to expel the Venezuelans is now being considered by a different court in Texas and is likely to ultimately make its way to the Supreme Court. The Justice Department’s filing on Friday concerned the narrower question of whether Judge Boasberg acted properly when he ordered Mr. Ensign and Mr. Reuveni to take the stand in Federal District Court in Washington on Monday and Tuesday.
Lawyers for the department have said that their testimony was not needed because both men have “no personal knowledge” about how the decision was made to send the deportation flights to El Salvador.
Moreover, the lawyers said, Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, has already acknowledged in a sworn statement to Judge Boasberg that she alone made that decision, relying on advice from top Justice Department officials, including Mr. Bove and Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general. Mr. Bove and Mr. Blanche also filed sworn statements to the judge, but lawyers for the Venezuelan men derided them as being “anemic” and said they “raise more questions than they answer.”
From the start of the dispute, the administration has claimed that it never violated Judge Boasberg’s order, arguing that his oral instructions to turn the planes around midair were not reflected in a subsequent written decision.
“While the judge had made some oral statements at an earlier hearing that suggested he wanted the government to ‘turn planes around,’ those statements were inconsistent, tentative and ultimately superseded by a written order that purported to memorialize the decree but said nothing about returning anyone from abroad,” the Justice Department wrote in its filing to the appeals court.
The American Civil Liberties Union, which is representing the Venezuelan men, said in a court filing late Thursday night that many questions remained unanswered and that Judge Boasberg had the full authority to demand information from the administration.
The A.C.L.U. lawyers said, for instance, that they wanted to know more about Mr. Bove’s statements suggesting that court orders could be ignored, and about the reaction from administration officials after Mr. Ensign told them about the order that Judge Boasberg ultimately handed down.
In its filing, the administration somewhat nervously expressed concern that having to answer some questions in front of Judge Boasberg would only lead to having to answer more questions.
“The forthcoming hearing has every appearance of an endless fishing expedition,” the Justice Department wrote, “aimed at an ever-widening list of witnesses and prolonged testimony.”
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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