Trump Target: The president, prone to bashing judges, sinks to new depths, calling for impeachment of James Boasberg, who ruled against him in deportation case

Judge James Boasberg (NY Times)

Donald Trump has a lengthy history of bashing judges who rule against him or his interests. Now, Trump has taken it a step further, saying one such judge should be impeached. The latest Trump target is U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg, of Washington, D.C., who had the audacity to find a few problems with Trump's deportation efforts, apparently thinking deportees actually have legal rights that weren't being observed. Perhaps even worse from Trump's perspective, Boasberg seems unperturbed to be the target of presidential invective, letting it roll off his robes.

Even with Republican allies joining Trump's impeachment chorus, Boasberg shows no signs of concern. So what is next in a case where the Trump administration appeared to ignore a judicial order to turn a plane around and return deportees to the United States where they were to receive -- oh, I don't know -- due process maybe? A jointly published story at Bloomberg and Yahoo! News addresses that question under the headline "Trump Call for Impeaching Judges Fuels Showdown With Courts."Write Erik Larson, Greg Stohr and Zoe Tillman:

After a string of legal losses for his administration, President Donald Trump’s call to impeach a federal judge — and an ensuing rebuke by the US Supreme Court chief justice — is laying the groundwork for a deepening clash between the White House and the judiciary.

Hours after Trump blasted a federal judge for trying to block the deportation of hundreds of alleged Venezuelan gang members, Chief Justice John Roberts issued a statement saying that impeachment is “not an appropriate response” to disagreement with court rulings. For the Republican-appointed justice, it was a rare public signal of pushback to the president. Here is the full statement from Roberts: “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate-review process exists for that purpose.”

The rare statement came just hours after a social media post from Trump, who described U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg as an unelected “troublemaker and agitator.” Boasberg had issued an order blocking deportation flights that Trump was carrying out by invoking wartime authorities from an 18th century law. Here is Trump's message for the judge, written on his social-media platform, Truth Social:

“HE DIDN’T WIN ANYTHING! I WON FOR MANY REASONS, IN AN OVERWHELMING MANDATE, BUT FIGHTING ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION MAY HAVE BEEN THE NUMBER ONE REASON FOR THIS HISTORIC VICTORY. I’m just doing what the VOTERS wanted me to do. This judge, like many of the Crooked Judges’ I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED!!!”

That Trump's broadside would prompt a response from Roberts is way out of the ordinary. Larson, Stohr and Tillman write:

“This kind of public rebuke from a chief justice of a president is extremely unusual,” said Keith Whittington, a Yale Law School professor and expert on constitutional law. “It’s a very serious and pretty extraordinary ratcheting up of tension between the White House and the judicial branch.”

The relationship between the co-equal branches of government is becoming increasingly strained as the Trump administration hits back at judges who side with those challenging his executive orders on issues from immigration to federal spending and diversity initiatives.

There are more than 150 cases pending against the administration from Maryland to California — setting up multiple tests of executive power that may ultimately land in the Supreme Court that Trump helped shape. Some judges have already called out the Trump administration for not following their orders.

Such scenarios have led some legal experts to say the nation is nearing a constitutional crisis. That’s not the case unless Trump openly defies a court order, which hasn’t really happened yet, said Whittington. But if “a president were to refuse to comply with a direct court order that would certainly get us closer,” he said. “And then the question is how other institutions respond.”

Retired Justice Stephen Breyer said on CNN Wednesday that it isn’t clear whether the country is in a constitutional crisis.

“No one really knows,” he said. “People have different views on that. And the best thing, I think, for the judges is you follow the law. You simply follow the law.”

That appears to be what Boasberg is doing. So what launched Trump's latest attack on the judiciary? From the Bloomberg/Yahoo! report:

The current dispute was triggered by Trump’s deportation of alleged members of the Tren de Aragua gang to El Salvador by invoking the seldom-used Alien Enemies Act. US District Judge James Boasberg in Washington issued an order to temporarily stop the deportation of the five Venezuelans, and later halted use of the law to deport any of the alleged gang members.

Lawyers from Trump's Justice Department have said the judge lacked power to order airplanes to turn around — at one point arguing the order didn’t apply because it was initially handed down orally from the bench — and has refused to answer some of his questions about the deportation flights. The department has asked a federal appeals court to take the judge off the case, saying his questions were “flagrantly improper” and presented “grave risks.”

The White House declined to comment for this article. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt doubled down at a press briefing Wednesday, saying that judges who are ruling against Trump are acting as “partisan activists.”

“We will continue to comply with these orders and fight in court, but there is a concerted effort by the far left to judge shop and pick judges who act as partisan activists from the bench,” she said. “We will not allow that to happen.”

As usual, Leavitt is clueless. George W. Bush originally appointed Boasberg to the federal bench (and Barack Obama later elevated him), so the tired "far left" argument doesn't work. Even Trump shows some restraint -- maybe even knowledge -- in comparison to Leavitt:

Trump derided Boasberg, without specifically naming him, as a “Radical Left Lunatic of a Judge, a troublemaker and agitator.” He reiterated his criticism in a Fox News interview with Laura Ingraham late Tuesday, saying that a “local judge” shouldn’t be making determinations about deportations. “Many people have called for his impeachment, the impeachment of this judge,” he said.

Earlier in the day, Boasberg issued an order extending by one day the government’s deadline to produce additional information about the deportations. The judge said the court needs the information “to determine if the government deliberately flouted its orders issued on March 15, 2025, and, if so, what the consequences should be.”

Trump denied defying a court order on Fox News and when pressed on whether he would do so in the future, he said “no, you can’t do that.”

“However, we have bad judges,” he added. “At a certain point you have to start looking at what do you do when you have a rogue judge?”

Robert McWhirter, a constitutional law expert and criminal defense attorney, called the government’s argument that it can disregard the court because a ruling wasn’t issued in writing “absurd.”

“This is an example of the Justice Department playing fast and loose with the judge,” he said, noting that such tactics, coupled with Trump’s attack on the judiciary, could backfire should any of his cases go to the Supreme Court.

“I think even this Supreme Court won’t stand for that,” he said.

McWhirter probably was referring to dubious rulings -- on Trump's apparent disqualification due to his legal status as an insurrectionist and on presidential immunity -- where the high court has favored Trump. Has the legal environment now swung in a different direction?

Broadly speaking, the Supreme Court offers a favorable environment for Trump as he tries to defang the federal bureaucracy and bolster presidential power.

The court’s 6-3 conservative majority includes three Trump appointees. All were in the majority last year when the court gave presidents sweeping criminal immunity, undercutting a federal prosecution of him for trying to overturn his 2020 election loss. Trump denied wrongdoing and a special prosecutor later dropped the case in light of his election win.

But early signs suggest the court’s willingness to stand behind the president in his new term has its limits. The high court first declined to let him immediately fire the head of a federal whistleblower office. Trump was eventually able to carry out the firing but only because of a subsequent lower court decision.

The justices later voted 5-4 not to lift a lower court order that told the administration to quickly pay as much as $2 billion in foreign aid bills. Trump-appointed Justice Amy Coney Barrett drew scorn in MAGA circles as she joined Roberts and the three liberals in the majority. And the court set out an unusually lengthy briefing schedule — hinting at a lack of urgency — when Trump asked for clearance to start implementing his planned restrictions on birthright citizenship. Roberts had yet to make any public comments on the judiciary since Trump took office. His remarks Tuesday were the first since his annual Dec. 31 report warned that violence, threats to defy lawful judgments and other “illegitimate activity” endanger judicial independence.

Roberts’ statement came from him alone and not on behalf of the entire court. But he is in some ways the only person who can speak for the entire judicial branch, said Kent Greenfield, a constitutional law expert and professor at Boston College Law School.

“Speaking back at Trump for the judicial branch is reasserting the authority of the judiciary to say what the law is,” Greenfield said. “Judges need to keep doing their jobs and I think that’s one reason why Roberts’ statement was so important.”

The dispute is just one unfolding between Trump and the courts. In some of the most high-profile cases, brought by nationwide nonprofits and civil rights groups, as well as unions and Democratic-led states, plaintiffs and judges alike have repeatedly suggested the government isn’t following court orders.

This week, a judge who ordered the administration to rehire thousands of probationary federal employees whom he ruled were fired illegally said workers in at least one agency appear to have been brought back and then placed on administrative leave in potential violation of his directive.

“This is not allowed by the preliminary injunction, for it would not restore the services the preliminary injunction intends to restore,” said William Alsup, the San Francisco-based federal judge.

Government lawyers on Tuesday disputed that the administration was trying to “skirt” the order in the California case. Administrative leave was “merely a first part of a series of steps to reinstate probationary employees,” DOJ lawyers wrote.

In a case over Trump’s spending freeze on trillions of dollars in federal funds for grants, loans and other financial assistance, a group of 19 states told a federal judge in Rhode Island on Monday that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was continuing to withhold millions of dollars in grants despite a court order lifting the freeze.

In a fight over a mass freeze of foreign aid, a federal judge in Washington criticized the government’s failure to resume spending as he ordered. A Seattle judge in another funding fight recently chided the administration’s “unreasonable interpretation” of her orders. Both stopped short of holding the government in contempt, however.

Judges have also called out the White House’s lack of transparency surrounding the activities of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) under Elon Musk, who is closely tied to the project.

A Maryland judge told a Justice Department lawyer that the administration’s explanations about Musk’s role were “highly suspicious.” This week, he ruled that challengers were likely to succeed in arguing that the billionaire exercised unconstitutional power in shuttering the US Agency for International Development (USAID).

The growing list of disputes over court orders is “part of an overall disregard on the part of the administration” for judicial authority, said Greenfield.

“These are the cracks in the dam,” he said. “Eventually, if there’s enough, it’s going to break.”

CBS News, under the headline "Judge calls DOJ filing "woefully insufficient" in legal standoff over deportation flights," reports that Boasberg has been unimpressed with the administration's responses to his rulings:

A federal judge on Thursday said the Justice Department "evaded its obligations" with a "woefully insufficient" response to his demand for more information about deportation flights that are at the center of a growing legal stand-off between the Trump administration and the courts.

Judge James Boasberg, the chief judge in the federal district court in Washington, D.C., demanded on Saturday that two deportation flights turn around in midair and return to the U.S. — an order the Trump administration did not follow, saying the flights were outside of U.S. airspace and therefore outside of the judge's jurisdiction. 

The flights carried more than 200 Venezuelan nationals to El Salvador, with the government relying on a wartime law known as the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport them. The law gives the president broad authority to expel foreign nationals during wartime. Boasberg blocked the administration from invoking that authority on Saturday.

In response to the government's failure to comply with his order, Boasberg directed the government to answer a number of questions regarding the flights, including what time the two planes departed from U.S. soil, their points of departure, what time they left U.S. airspace, when they landed and when the deportees were transferred out of U.S. custody. 

Boasberg gave government attorneys a deadline of noon on Thursday to respond. The judge wrote in an order later in the afternoon that the government's response was filed after the deadline and featured only the sworn declaration of an acting ICE official who did not provide any new information in the case.

"This is woefully insufficient," Boasberg wrote.

In his order Saturday, Boasberg blocked not just the deportation of the plaintiffs, but of all potential deportees under the Alien Enemies Act. That order set off a back-and-forth between the judge and the Justice Department over whether the administration knowingly defied his directive to halt the deportations and turn the planes around. 

On Thursday, the judge ordered the government to brief him by next Tuesday on why the failure to return the planes to the U.S. did not violate his temporary restraining order. He also demanded a declaration from "an official with direct involvement" in Cabinet-level discussions over invoking a legal mechanism known as the state secrets privilege. Boasberg set a deadline of 10 a.m. Friday for that declaration.

On Wednesday, Attorney General Pam Bondi and top Justice Department officials said the government may invoke the state secrets privilege as justification for withholding information about the flights from Boasberg. A Justice Department spokesperson said the agency "continues to believe that the court's superfluous questioning of sensitive national security information is inappropriate judicial overreach."

While the government has not provided Boasberg with the details he has requested, CBS News has obtained an internal government list of the names of the Venezuelan men the Trump administration deported to El Salvador as part of the secretive operation on Saturday. The men were taken to a notorious Salvadoran prison.

In a sworn statement submitted to Boasberg on Thursday, an immigration attorney told the court that one of the deported men is a professional soccer player in Venezuela with no criminal history who was falsely linked to Tren de Aragua. The attorney argued that the man, Jerce Reyes Barrios, was accused of being connected to the gang in part because of a tattoo on his arm. The attorney said the tattoo was based on the logo for the Real Madrid football club.

Other court filings challenging the deportations allege troubling conditions during last weekend's flights and preparations. Plaintiffs' attorneys argued there was "chaos on the plane," "taunting" from officers, dangerous heat on board on tarmac, "crying and frightened" deportees and media prestaged to chronicle their arrival and departure.

One might expect that Bondi, as attorney general, could help calm the waters. But MSNBC and Yahoo! News, in an op-ed piece, say that has not happened. Under the headline "Pam Bondi’s attack on Judge James Boasberg is an attack on checks and balances," Anthony Coley writes:

President Donald Trump’s team is effective at using fiery rhetoric, which often includes lies, to paint his opponents as villains and to manufacture crises they insist only he can solve. Take the current fracas over the deportation of Venezuelan migrants whose alleged gang ties led Trump to declare them terrorists.

The debate reached fever pitch Wednesday, when Attorney General Pam Bondi, in an appearance on Fox News, launched an incendiary attack on so-called liberal U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, accusing him of "meddling in our government." Bondi said, "And the question should be, why is the judge trying to protect terrorists who invaded our country over American citizens?”

Whoa, nelly. That’s quite the statement. Rather, it's empty rhetoric not supported by facts.

What’s especially pernicious is Bondi’s arrogant use of “our government” — as if the federal judiciary is not a co-equal branch of government. There’s an old-fashioned, but still appropriate idea that the public is best served when the Department of Justice speaks through its court filings. It’s also outrageous for Bondi to launch a verbal assault against a federal judge amidst an increased wave of violent threats. None of this is normal. 

But this is how Bondi rolls. In less than two months, the attorney general, who’s sworn to protect and defend all of us, has gained a reputation for just offering red meat to MAGA conservatives, whether lying about crime rates or mocking Hunter Biden at partisan political conferences or shattering norms by appearing exclusively on one conservative TV network every week of her tenure. She first proved herself in 2020, embracing Trump’s big lie that the 2020 election was stolen. She even travelled to Pennsylvania and made claims of “evidence of cheating” and “fake ballots” that didn’t exist.

It should come as no surprise, then, that Bondi the MAGA warrior would viciously attack Boasberg, a nonpartisan judge who was appointed to a seat on the D.C. Superior Court by Republican President George W. Bush. When President Barack Obama nominated him for a federal judgeship a decade later, the U.S. Senate unanimously confirmed him.

Judge Boasberg is neither a knee-jerk liberal nor a died-in-the-wool conservative. He has issued rulings that Trump supported, such as when he ordered the FBI to release thousands of emails belonging to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and he has issued rulings that Trump opposed, such as clearing the way for former Vice President Mike Pence to provide grand jury testimony in DOJ’s investigation of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. In law school, “this Democrat activist,” as White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt wrongly labeled him this week, roomed with now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who presided over his investiture.

Contrary to Bondi’s incendiary rhetoric that Judge Boasberg has “no right to ask those questions,” the truth is he has the right and is right to ask hard questions of the president’s use of the Alien Enemies Act. The law was last used following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in World War II to relocate and incarcerate thousands of people of Japanese ancestry in the U.S. The Trump administration has provided no proof — to the court or anybody else — that the individuals detained and deported are in fact violent gang members in the country illegally. They’re telling the court and the public, but not showing us the proof, as MSNBC’s Ali Vitali observed.

It’s easy to understand why Judge Boasberg would have some questions, given the Trump administration’s “shoot first, ask questions later” sloppy approach to government. Like when they mistakenly declared a Seattle man dead and stopped his Social Security benefits; or abruptly fired (and then rehired) hundreds highly trained federal employees working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs. Or inadvertently released Social Security numbers and other private information of former congressional staff. The list of things they should be questioned about is long.

But none of this matters to the Trump administration, which senses a political opening. And on the underlying question — the removal of any violent undocumented immigrant from the country — he has the support of most Americans, including Democrats. In fact, immigration/border security is the only major issue in which the majority of Americans approve of how Trump is handling it, according NBC News polling. Fifty-five percent of voters approve of his handling of the issue, while 43% disapprove. A clear majority, 56%, say he’s bringing the “right kind of change” on the issue.

But even policies that the American people approve of must be carried out according to the law, and, as Judge Boasberg is working to determine if applicable laws were followed, Trump and his administration are sowing discord for his political benefit.