D.C. District Chief Judge James Boasberg suffered a humiliating legal defeat on Tuesday in his efforts to stymie President Trump’s deportation of illegal aliens from the United States.
In a 2-1 ruling, a three-judge panel for the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals shot down the Obama appointee’s attempted criminal contempt proceedings against Trump administration officials involved in last year’s deportation of suspected Tren de Aragua gang members to El Salvador. More specifically, the panel granted the government’s request for a writ of mandamus, “a rare and extraordinary order from a higher court directing a lower court or government official to stop exceeding their authority,” as described by the Washington Examiner.
The D.C. Circuit panel had temporarily halted Boasberg’s criminal contempt proceedings against the administration back in December. As noted by Judge Neomi Rao in her Tuesday opinion, however, Boasberg nonetheless plowed ahead by “expand[ing]” his inquiry “to extract more information from government counsel about exactly what happened” throughout the aforementioned deportations.
Those actions, Rao summarized, amount to a “clear abuse of discretion” by Boasberg.
“The district court proposes to probe high-level Executive Branch deliberations about matters of national security and diplomacy. These proceedings are a clear abuse of discretion, as the district court’s order said nothing about transferring custody of the plaintiffs and therefore lacks the clarity to support criminal contempt based on the transfer of custody,” Rao wrote for the majority. “Moreover, the government has already provided the name of the responsible official [then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem], so further judicial investigation is unnecessary and therefore improper. In these circumstances, mandamus is appropriate to prevent the district court from assuming an antagonistic jurisdiction that encroaches on the autonomy of the Executive Branch.”
Hellbound and Down 