After attacking judges and repeatedly sidestepping their orders, the Trump administration has accused a federal judge in Washington of escalating tensions between the judicial and executive branches by seeking to hold the White House accountable for its courtroom behavior.
The accusation against the judge, James E. Boasberg, came in a court filing early Friday morning by the Justice Department. In it, department lawyers asked the federal appeals court that sits over Judge Boasberg to prevent him from opening an expansive contempt inquiry into whether the White House violated an order he issued in March to stop flights of Venezuelan migrants from being sent to El Salvador under the authority of a powerful wartime statute.
Much of the filing to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia read like a normal legal brief, laying out the government’s challenge to a judicial order it did not like. But in its opening line, department lawyers made clear that they believed Judge Boasberg’s recent threat to open criminal contempt proceedings in the deportation case represented another salvo in an increasingly bitter battle between the White House and the courts.
“‘Occasions for constitutional confrontation between the two branches should be avoided whenever possible,’” the department lawyers wrote, failing to mention their own role in fostering such confrontations. “The district court’s criminal contempt order instead escalates the constitutional stakes by infringing core executive prerogatives.”
The Justice Department’s attempt to blame Judge Boasberg for raising the temperature came as another federal judge, in another deportation case, has opened her own high-stakes inquiry into whether the administration has violated court orders.
In that case, Judge Paula Xinis announced on Tuesday in Federal District Court in Maryland that the administration in the next two weeks would have to answer questions about why it had so far apparently failed to comply with directions from the Supreme Court to “facilitate” the release of a Maryland man, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, from the same Salvadoran prison to which the Venezuelan migrants had been sent.
