Appeals court again blocks contempt inquiry into deportation flights

A divided appeals court ruled Tuesday that D.C.’s chief federal judge must end his inquiry into possible criminal contempt by Trump administration officials who disregarded court orders last year to halt flights of Venezuelan migrants to a prison in El Salvador.

The ruling marked the second time the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, by a 2-1 vote, has stopped Chief U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg from pursuing the contempt probe in the high-profile case over President Donald Trump’s efforts to ramp up deportations. Federal judges across the country have found that the administration’s rapid moves in many cases have violated migrants’ rights to challenge their removals in court. Boasberg in a series of rulings has stressed that the Venezuelan migrants must get due process.

Writing for the appeals panel, Judge Neomi Rao said that Boasberg had assumed “an improper jurisdiction antagonistic to the Executive Branch” and that “any referral for prosecution [of contempt charges] faces a dead end.” She was joined by Judge Justin R. Walker, who like Rao was nominated to the bench by Trump.

But the contempt proceedings could be revived. A majority of the active judges on the D.C. Circuit previously indicated that Boasberg was justified in launching his inquiry. The lead attorney for the Venezuelan plaintiffs said Tuesday’s ruling to stop the proceedings will be appealed to the full D.C. Circuit.

The attorney, Lee Gelernt of the American Civil Liberties Union, said “there can be no serious doubt that the administration did in fact deliberately violate the court’s order.” “The stakes could not be higher if the executive branch is ultimately allowed to avoid accountability for deliberately violating a court order, especially one of this magnitude,” Gelernt said in a statement.

Acting attorney general Todd Blanche welcomed the ruling. “Today’s decision by the DC Circuit should finally end Judge Boasberg’s year-long campaign against the hardworking Department attorneys doing their jobs fighting illegal immigration,” he said in a post on X.

Last March, Boasberg issued a temporary restraining order barring authorities from transporting a group of Venezuelan men to a notorious megaprison in El Salvador under the provisions of a wartime statute, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. The judge said those 137 migrants should first get a chance to argue in court that the Trump administration wrongly designated them as members of the violent Tren de Aragua gang.

The Supreme Court ultimately voided that restraining order, and the migrants were eventually transported from El Salvador to Venezuela. But a contempt inquiry was warranted, Boasberg said, because administration officials defied his order before the high court issued its ruling. A Supreme Court precedent from 1967 says violating a court order is punishable as contempt even if that order is later overturned on appeal, Boasberg said.

Two flights with migrants were in the air when Boasberg first ruled orally from the bench on March 15, 2025, and they were not recalled. Two more flights departed the next day, Boasberg said, hours after he had issued the temporary restraining order in writing. The judge said he intended to get testimony from at least two people: a Justice Department whistleblower who was fired, Erez Reuveni, and Drew Ensign, a department attorney whom Reuveni accused of misleading the court about the migrant flights.

Then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem said in a court filing that she made the decision to keep flying the migrants after Boasberg’s rulings, following advice from top attorneys at the departments of Justice and Homeland Security. Trump dismissed Noem as homeland security secretary last month.

“The government has identified Secretary Noem as the responsible official and also provided further declarations from other high-ranking officials,” Rao wrote in Tuesday’s ruling. “The district court now possesses the information it identified as necessary to make a referral for prosecution. Any further judicial investigation is irrelevant.”

She then said that any contempt charge against Noem or other officials could not be prosecuted, because Boasberg’s temporary restraining order barring the flights last March had been incorrectly drafted in that it “did not clearly and specifically say anything about transferring custody of the detainees.”

In a dissent, Judge J. Michelle Childs said the majority “has stymied the district court’s inherent and statutory powers and done so in a way that will affect not only these contempt proceedings but will also echo in future proceedings.”

“Simply put, determining whether there are facts to support probable cause for contempt is not a vindictive or retaliatory exercise,” wrote Childs, who was nominated by President Joe Biden. “Nor does factfinding suggest that the court wishes to intrude in the decisionmaking of the Executive Branch. Our law essentially requires factfinding before referral for indirect criminal contempt prosecution.”

The D.C. Circuit previously ruled to end the contempt probe in August, for different reasons. As in Tuesday’s ruling, two Trump-appointed judges ruled then that the contempt inquiry was unjustified, while a third judge dissented.

The post Appeals court again blocks contempt inquiry into deportation flights appeared first on Washington Post.