Update: Boasberg Says White House Is In Contempt

We were expecting contempt charges to be brought against the Punk administration, but not this fast and not necessarily from this direction. Chief U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg’s April 16 order is blistering, at one point saying that the administration acted  “deliberately and gleefully” as they intentionally ignored his order last month to not send over 200 men to the prison in El Salvador. He later says that the administration demonstrated “willful disregard” for the March 15 order.

“The court does not reach such conclusion lightly or hastily; indeed, it has given defendants ample opportunity to rectify or explain their actions,” Boasberg wrote in his April 16 ruling. “Defendants provide no convincing reason to avoid the conclusion that appears obvious from the above factual recitation: that they deliberately flouted this court’s written order and, separately, its oral command that explicitly delineated what compliance entailed.”

Boasberg’s findings include details of flight-tracking software, courtroom drama, and social-media posts by Trump. The judge said he had a “growing realization, then, that the government might be rapidly dispatching removal flights in an apparent effort to evade judicial review…”

“The Constitution does not tolerate willful disobedience of judicial orders — especially by officials of a coordinate branch who have sworn an oath to uphold it,” Boasberg wrote. “To permit such officials to freely ‘annul the judgments of the courts of the United States’ would not just ‘destroy the rights acquired under those judgments’; it would make ‘a solemn mockery’ of ‘the constitution itself.'”

While SCOTUS has upheld the President’s ability to send people to the El Salvador prison, it also states that those detained had a right to defend themselves against deportation, something the administration opposes.

Boasberg said the administration could purge itself of contempt by returning to U.S. custody those who were sent to the El Salvador prison in violation of his order so that they “might avail themselves of their right to challenge their removability.”

The White House has yet to respond, but no one is expecting them to cooperate based on their lack of response to previous orders. That Constitutional Crisis we mentioned this morning? Yeah, that’s about to get a lot worse.