A federal judge who temporarily blocked Donald Trump’s administration from deporting accused Venezuelan gang members under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act law condemned the lawyers for being “intemperate and disrespectful” in court.
The Washington DC-based judge, James Boasberg, continues considering whether to maintain his ban – and whether officials violated it, which would expose them to sanctions.
Boasberg told the deputy assistant attorney general, Drew Ensign, that language in some of the government’s court filings had a tone that he could not recall ever having heard previously from government lawyers.
Boasberg did not specify the language he took issue with. A government filing on Wednesday accused Boasberg of engaging in a “judicial fishing expedition” in seeking more information about deportation flights.
The judge said he often advises his law clerks that their most valuable assets are their reputation and their credibility.
“I would just ask you to make sure that your team maintains that lesson,” Boasberg told Ensign.
“The policy ramifications of this are incredibly troublesome and problematic and concerning,” Boasberg said, adding: “The government is not being terribly cooperative at this point … but I will get to the bottom of whether they violated my order and who was responsible.”
The escalating dispute between Boasberg and the Trump White House has raised concerns among critics of the president and some legal experts about a potentially looming constitutional crisis if the administration defies judicial decisions. Boasberg has also ordered US justice department officials to explain by next Tuesday why he should not find that they violated the 15 March order by failing to return two planes carrying the deportees that landed in El Salvador – where the migrants are being held – after he issued his ruling on Saturday evening.
Under the US constitution, the executive and the judiciary are co-equal branches of government, along with Congress, in a system devised for checks and balances among the three.
Trump has said he would not defy any court orders. Speaking to reporters on Friday, the Republican said his administration has the authority to “get bad people out of our country” while insulting Boasberg as “a radical left lunatic”.
Trump on Tuesday called for the judge to be impeached by Congress in a process that could lead to his removal from the bench, drawing a rare rebuke from the US chief justice, John Roberts.
Boasberg, appointed to the federal bench by Barack Obama, was confirmed in 2011 in a bipartisan 96-0 vote in the US Senate. He had previously been appointed to a local Washington DC court by George W Bush, Obama’s Republican predecessor.
Trump’s administration over the weekend invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to justify the expulsions of the alleged members of Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua without final removal orders from immigration judges.
Boasberg issued a 14-day block on any such deportations, finding that the Alien Enemies Act did not provide a basis for Trump’s assertion that Tren de Aragua’s presence in the United States amounted to an act of war.
Lawyers and family members of several of the 238 men deported to El Salvador over the weekend have said their relatives had no ties to the gang. “I don’t know why they connected him to the Tren de Aragua if he has nothing to do with that,” Deicy Aldana, the wife of detained migrant Andres Guillermo Morales, told Reuters on Thursday.
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Lindsay Toczylowski, a California-based lawyer for the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, accused Trump of waging “sickening” psychological warfare against asylum seekers and migrants.
“In my 15 years of representing people in removal proceedings in the United States, this is the most shocking thing that I’ve ever seen happen to one of our clients,” said Toczylowski, who is representing one of the Venezuelan immigrants deported from the US.
Despite Trump calling the Venezuelan migrants “heinous monsters”, relatives of Francisco Javier García Casique, 24, say he is innocent after they spotted him in a recent video showing numerous detained Venezuelans being transported to an El Salvador prison.
“I never in my life thought I would see my brother like that – handcuffed, his head shaved, in a prison for murderers, where they put rapists and kidnappers,” Casique’s younger brother Sebastián said about his brother, who travelled to the US two years ago in search of better opportunities. “It is very painful.”
Separately, on Friday, law enforcement officials from the Florida highway patrol and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) said they arrested a known member of Tren de Aragua.
Authorities said the arrest of Franklin Jose Jimenez-Bracho – a known and wanted human trafficker and smuggler – made him the first migrant in the US detained under Trump’s Alien Enemies Act invocation.
However, in Cobb county, Georgia, on Thursday, authorities announced the arrest of another purported Tren de Aragua member, identified as Ricardo Gonzales.
Source: theguardian.com
