White House says it didn’t defy court order on deportations as judge calls hearing
The Trump administration says it did not defy a weekend court order to halt the use of wartime powers to fast-track deportations of alleged Venezuelan gang members to El Salvador. They’re also trying to push the judge who issued the ruling off the case.
“We are wholly confident that we are going to win this case in court,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said at Monday’s White House press briefing.
Attorneys with the Department of Justice argued during an emergency hearing Monday afternoon in U.S. District Judge James Boasberg’s Washington courtroom that they did not violate his order on Saturday blocking the federal government from using the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelan immigrants accused of being members of the violent gang Tren de Aragua.
President Donald Trump had cited the rarely-utilized wartime law in a new executive order allowing the federal government to quickly expel alleged members of the gang, which has been classified as a terrorist organization. Hours after Boasberg’s order, El Salvador’s president announced that hundreds of alleged gang members had been flown to the Central American country, where they would be kept in a maximum-security prison for up to a year.
DOJ attorneys maintained in court filings that the administration did not refuse to comply with Boasberg’s order, focusing on the judge’s written order over one he issued verbally from the bench earlier in the everning, in which he reportedly said that any planes in the air should be turn around and head back to the United States. Leavitt told reporters Monday that Boasberg’s order, “which had no lawful basis, was issued after terrorist [Tren de Aragua] aliens had already been removed from U.S. territory.”
Leavitt said the U.S. paid $6 million to El Salvador to take the 261 alleged gang members, which she described as “pennies on the dollar in comparison to the cost of life and the cost it would impose on the American taxpayer.”
In court documents, Trump’s attorneys said they did deport gang members under the Alien Enemies Act, but said those flights had left U.S. airspace by the time the judge’s written order had been issued. They said that meant the flights were not subject to the order, because those alleged gang members had already been “removed” from the country.
“Some gang members subject to removal under the Proclamation had already been removed from the United States territory under the Proclamation before the issuance of this Court’s second order,” wrote Deputy Attorney General Drew Ensign in the appeal.
Ensign on Monday also criticized Boasberg in a filing to the Clerk of the Court of the United States Court of Appeals, saying he’d overreached and interfered with sensitive matters of national security. He requested that the case be reassigned to a different judge, referring to Boasman’s actions as a “hasty public inquiry into these sensitive national security matters—with no contemplated protections against disclosure of operational details ...”
In court Monday, Justice Department attorneys were sparing with their details about the flights, according to reporters in attendance.
A skeptical Boasberg directed Trump administration attorneys to provide a written case by noon Tuesday for why they could not reveal specific details about the flights they used to deport the alleged gang members, according to a reporter from The Guardian.
Critics of the administration stress that many of the alleged gang members could be denied due process without a trial. The American Civil Liberties Union, which brought the case before Boasberg on behalf of five Venezuelans threatened with deportation under the Alien Enemies Act, said several of their clients slated for deportation had been wrongly accused of being gang members
“People on the flight sent to El Salvador had ZERO opportunity to contest the government’s evidence. Many said they were falsely accused of belong[ing] to Tren de Aragua,” posted Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at The American Immigration Council. “There was no due process at all.”
Under questioning at the White House about the evidence Trump officials used to support deportation, Leavitt referred to a wide span of crimes, though she did not detail formal charges.
“These are designated foreign terrorists ... These are heinous monsters, rapists, murderers, kidnappers, sexual assaulters, predators,” she said.
Reality Check: Trump deports hundreds of alleged Venezuelan gang members. Did he defy a court order?
Trump allies have signaled they are itching for a fight with what they see as activist courts impeding the president’s prerogatives.
Leavitt, in her separate, earlier statement, said that ”federal courts generally have no jurisdiction over the president’s conduct of foreign affairs, his authorities under the Alien Enemies Act, and his core Article II powers to remove foreign alien terrorists from U.S. soil and repel a declared invasion.”
Leavitt continued: “A single judge in a single city cannot direct the movements of an aircraft carrier full of foreign alien terrorists who were physically expelled from U.S. soil.”
For weeks, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, special presidential envoy Richard Grenell and special envoy for Latin America Mauricio Claver-Carone negotiated with the governments of El Salvador and Maduro, who is serving as Venezuela’s president, to facilitate the removals, according to court documents.
Inside Look: El Salvador’s mega-prison holding Venezuelan deportees with alleged gang ties
“The foreign policy of the U.S. would suffer harm if the removal of the individuals associated with TdA were prevented, taking into account … the possibility foreign interlocutors might change their minds regarding their willingness to accept certain individuals associated with TdA removed or might otherwise seek to leverage this as an ongoing issue,” wrote Michael G. Kozak, a senior Trump official in the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, in a court filing Saturday.
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On Fox News Monday, border czar Tom Homan said the administration is planning more international deportation flights.
“We’re not stopping, I don’t care what judges say, I don’t care what the left thinks, we’re coming,” said Homan.
This story was originally published March 17, 2025 at 12:04 PM.
