A federal judge on Monday questioned whether the Trump administration ignored his orders to turn around planes carrying deportees to El Salvador, a possible violation of the decision he’d issued minutes before.

District Judge James E. Boasberg was incredulous over the administration’s contentions that his verbal directions did not count, that only his written order needed to be followed, that it couldn’t apply to flights that had left the U.S. and that the administration could not answer his questions about the deportations due to national security issues.

“That’s one heck of a stretch, I think,” Boasberg replied, noting that the administration knew as the planes were departing that he was about to decide whether to briefly halt deportations being made under a rarely used 18th century law invoked by Trump about an hour earlier.

“I’m just asking how you think my equitable powers do not attach to a plane that has departed the U.S., even if it’s in international airspace,” Boasberg added at another point.

Deputy Associate Attorney General Abhishek Kambli contended that only Boasberg’s short written order, issued about 45 minutes after he made the verbal demand, counted. It did not contain any demands to reverse planes, and Kambli added that it was too late to redirect two planes that had left the U.S. by that time.

“These are sensitive, operational tasks of national security,” Kambli said.

The hearing over what Boasberg called the “possible defiance” of his court order marked the latest step in a high-stakes legal fight that began when President Donald Trump invoked the 1798 wartime law to remove immigrants over the weekend. It was also an escalation in the battle over whether the Trump administration is flouting court orders that have blocked some of his aggressive moves in the opening weeks of his second term.

“There’s been a lot of talk about constitutional crisis, people throw that word around. I think we’re getting very close to it,” warned Lee Gelernt of the ACLU, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs, during the Monday hearing. After the hearing, Gelernt said the ACLU would ask Boasberg to order all improperly deported people returned to the United States.

Boasberg said he’d record the proceedings and additional demands in writing. “I will memorialize this in a written order since apparently my oral orders don’t seem to carry much weight,” Boasberg said.

On Saturday night, Boasberg ordered the administration not to deport anyone in its custody through the newly-invoked Alien Enemies Act, which has only been used three times before in U.S. history, all during congressionally declared wars. Trump issued a proclamation that the law was newly in effect due to what he claimed was an invasion by the Venezuelan gang Aragua Train.

Trump’s invocation of the act could allow him to deport any noncitizen he says is associated with the gang, without offering proof or even publicly identifying them. The plaintiffs filed their suit on behalf of several Venezuelans in U.S. custody who feared they’d be falsely accused of being Tren de Aragua members and improperly removed from the country.

Told there were planes in the air headed to El Salvador, which has agreed to house deported migrants in a notorious prison, Boasberg said Saturday evening that he and the government needed to move fast. “You shall inform your clients of this immediately, and that any plane containing these folks that is going to take off or is in the air needs to be returned to the United States,” Boasberg told the government’s lawyer.

According to the filing, two planes that had taken off from Texas’ detention facility when the hearing started more than an hour earlier were in the air at that point, and they apparently continued to El Salvador. A third plane apparently took off after the hearing and Boasberg’s written order was formally published at 7:26 p.m. Eastern time. Kambli said that plane held no one deported under the Alien Enemies Act.

El Salvador’s President, Nayib Bukele, on Sunday morning tweeted, “Oopsie…too late” above an article referencing Boasberg’s order and announced that more than 200 deportees had arrived in his country. The White House communications director, Steven Cheung, reposted Bukele’s post with an admiring GIF.

Later Sunday, a widely circulated article in Axios said the administration decided to “defy” the order and quoted anonymous officials who said they concluded it didn’t extend to planes outside U.S. airspace. That drew a quick denial from White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, who said in a statement “the administration did not ‘refuse to comply’ with a court order.”

The administration argues a federal judge does not have the authority to tell the president whether he can determine the country is being invaded under the act, or how to defend it.

After Boasberg scheduled a hearing Monday and said the government should be prepared to answer questions over its conduct, the Justice Department objected, saying it could not answer in a public forum because it involved “sensitive questions of national security, foreign relations, and coordination with foreign nations.” Boasberg denied the government’s request to cancel the hearing, which led the Trump administration to ask that the judge be taken off the case.

Kambli stressed that the government believes it is complying with Boasberg’s order. It has said in writing it will not use Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act to deport anyone if Boasberg’s order is not overturned on appeal, a pledge Kambli made again verbally in court Monday. “None of this is necessary because we did comply with the court’s written order,” Kambli said.

Boasberg’s temporary restraining order is only in effect for up to 14 days as he oversees the litigation over Trump’s unprecedented use of the act, which is likely to raise new constitutional issues that can only ultimately be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court. He had scheduled a hearing Friday for further arguments, but the two organizations that filed the initial lawsuit, the ACLU and Democracy Forward, urged him to force the administration to explain in a declaration under oath what happened.

As the courtroom drama built, so did international fallout over the deportations to El Salvador. Venezuela’s government on Monday characterized the transfer of migrants to El Salvador as “kidnappings” that it plans to challenge as “crimes against humanity” before the United Nations and other international organizations. It also accused Bukele’s government of profiting off the plights of Venezuelan migrants.

“President, I respectfully say to you, are you going to support this cruelty, this injustice … of imprisoning noble, hard-working migrants, good people, without trial, without having committed crimes in El Salvador, without any kind of sentence issued by a Salvadoran court?” President Nicolás Maduro said on state television. “Is this legal? Is it fair? Is it humane?”

Trump’s proclamation alleges Tren de Aragua is acting as a “hybrid criminal state” in partnership with Venezuela.

Families of some Venezuelans in U.S. custody scrambled to find out if their loved ones had been sent to El Salvador. Multiple immigration lawyers said they had clients who were not gang members who were being moved for possible deportation late Friday.

Franco Caraballo was held by immigration authorities during a routine check-in Feb. 3. His immigration lawyer, Martin Rosenow, said Caraballo not been accused of a crime. Caraballo’s wife believes he’s been wrongfully accused of belonging to the gang because of a tattoo he got marking his daughter’s birthday,

He called his wife Friday night in a panic because he was being handcuffed and put on a plane to an unknown destination in Texas, from where flights to El Salvador departed.

That was the last the family heard of him and he’s disappeared from the federal immigration detainee locator system. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Rosenow.

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Cano reported from Caracas, Venezuela. Joshua Goodman in Miami, Michael Kunzelman in Washington, D.C., and Nicholas Riccardi in Denver contributed to this report.

As a matter of course, journalists contact the U.S. Supreme Court for comment with some regularity, though the results are nearly always the same: The justices and their offices generally decline to weigh in.

There are, however, very rare exceptions.

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts issued a highly unusual statement on Tuesday morning, for example, that read, “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.”

It’s worth appreciating what precipitated these rather pointed comments.

In the run-up to Election Day, Donald Trump invested a fair amount of time condemning those who criticize judges — conveniently ignoring his own record of criticizing jurists who’ve dared to rule in ways he disagreed with. Six months ago, the Republican went so far as to eventually declare“These people should be put in jail the way they talk about our judges.”

To a degree, the president’s line hasn’t changed. As recently as Friday, Trump delivered unhinged remarks at the Justice Department, where he defended U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump-appointed conservative who helped dismiss his classified documents case. Referring to her many critics, the president told the law enforcement officials in the audience, “It’s totally illegal what they do.”

Four days later, Politico reported on the president calling for a different federal district court judge’s impeachment.

Apparently furious about Boasberg’s handling of the Alien Enemies Act litigation, the president published an especially enraged item to his social media platform, referring to the federal district court judge as a “Radical Left Lunatic,” a “troublemaker” and an “agitator.” After a series of all-caps claims about the fact that the jurist isn’t an elected official — in this country, federal judges aren’t chosen by voters — Trump concluded, “This judge, like many of the Crooked Judges’ I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED!!!”

If this talk sounds at all familiar, it’s not your imagination. As Jay Willis recently summarized at Balls and Strikes, Elon Musk has been “posting incessantly, calling for the impeachment of ‘fake,’ ‘corrupt,’ ‘activist’ judges for ‘violating the will of the people.’ His timeline … is littered with conspiratorial screeds about the dastardly ulterior motives that these judges must have had for preventing an unelected billionaire from assuming the power of the legislative and executive branches all for himself.”

Similar talk has become relatively common on Capitol Hill. Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, for example, recently posted a message to social media that read, “Corrupt judges should be impeached. And removed.” It came on the heels of a similar message Lee published earlier this month that read, “This has the feel of a coup — not a military coup, but a judicial one.”

In the U.S. House, a handful of Republican members have introduced four separate impeachment resolutions targeting sitting federal judges, and that total is likely to grow: Republican Rep. Andy Ogles of Tennessee recently hosted an online “impeachathon” eventdisplaying a poster of 11 judges he and his far-right colleagues are focused on. The far-right congressman appeared alongside a caption that read “Woke Judge Hunter.” (A clip of the event was promoted by Musk.)

While Boasberg wasn’t part of the 11, Republican Rep. Brandon Gill of Texas announced this week that he plans to file articles of impeachment against this judge in the coming days.

This campaign, however, has been largely relegated to the fringe. There are over 250 GOP lawmakers across the House and the Senate, and the total number of Republicans talking about impeaching federal judges is, as a quantitative matter, fairly small. Few, if any, credible observers have predicted that the impeachment push would ever be taken seriously on Capitol Hill.

But it’s against this backdrop that the sitting Republican president has decided to throw his weight behind an impeachment effort — not because Boasberg committed high crimes or abused his office, but because the judge is handling an important case in a way Trump doesn’t like.

The White House has been engaged in an intensifying fight with the judicial branch, and there’s been growing speculation about whether the administration might consider defying court rulings that the president doesn’t like. With his impeachment call, Trump just took that fight to a new level.

This post has been updated to include Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts’ comments.

Steve legs

Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an BLN political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”

As part of Donald Trump’s 2024 candidacy, the Republican made a variety of promises related to personnel, including a public vow to welcome former White House national security adviser Michael Flynn back into the fold. The lingering question, however, was in what capacity the retired general would return.

At a Mar-a-Lago event last month, the president said he’d offered Flynn “about 10 jobs.” Evidently, the two men settled on one. The New York Times reported:

The appointment comes just days after the president singled out Flynn for praise during an unhinged speech at the Justice Department.

To be sure, the oversight board at West Point has limited authority, so it’s not as if Trump is rewarding his longtime ally with a position of enormous power and influence.

But given his record, the fact that Flynn has been named to any position is rather extraordinary.

As the Times’ report noted, Flynn is perhaps best known for having been fired early in Trump’s first term after getting caught lying to the FBI about his covert communications with Russian officials. Years later, as regular readers might recallFlynn allegedly plotted with the president in the Oval Office after Trump’s 2020 defeat, exploring ways to overturn the presidential election. According to the Jan. 6 committee’s investigations, the retired general reportedly raised the prospect of seizing voting machines, deploying U.S. troops, and declaring martial law as part of the anti-election scheme.

In the months and years that followed, additional evidence of Flynn’s radicalism emerged. In 2021, for example, he appeared to endorse a military coup. Months later, the retired general suggested people may be exposed to Covid vaccines by way of salad dressing. He soon after made the case that the United States should have a single religion.

Flynn has also talked up the bizarre “PizzaGate” conspiracy theory, suggested unnamed people were “putting components of robotics into us” by way of Covid shots, and similarly shared an odd idea related to “5G technology” and a “pathogen” that he said might be hidden in vaccines.

In a normal administration, someone with a record like this would find that his phone calls go unreturned. In this administration, the president singles out Flynn for praise and rewards him with an appointment to the oversight board of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

Steve legs

Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an BLN political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”