A federal judge in Washington plans to press the Trump administration at a hearing on Monday about whether it has violated an order he issued barring officials from removing any detained noncitizens — including several suspected Venezuelan gang members — from the country with little or no due process.
The hearing was scheduled by the judge, James E. Boasberg, even as President Trump’s so-called border czar, Tom Homan, made defiant remarks on television, indicating that the administration planned to continue such deportations despite the court’s order — an action that could thrust the country into a constitutional crisis, pitting one of the coequal branches of the government against another.
“We’re not stopping,” Mr. Homan said Monday, during an appearance on Fox News. “I don’t care what the judges think, I don’t care what the left thinks. We’re coming.”
Mr. Homan defended the administration’s decision to fly more than 200 immigrants to El Salvador over the weekend, including individuals the government identified as members of the Tren de Aragua criminal gang. He added that the public should expect more deportation flights “every day.”
The legal battle over the removal of the immigrants was the latest — and perhaps most serious — flashpoint yet between federal courts, which have sought to curb many of Mr. Trump’s recent executive actions, and an administration that has repeatedly come close to openly refusing to comply with judicial orders.
Mr. Trump himself expressed skepticism about a ruling last week by a federal judge in California ordering the administration to rehire thousands of fired probationary workers. Mr. Trump told reporters on Sunday night that the judge was “putting himself in the position of the president of the United States, who was elected by close to 80 million votes.”
The hearing in the deported immigrant case was scheduled for 5 p.m. Monday in Federal District Court in Washington. Judge Boasberg said that lawyers for the Justice Department should be prepared to tell him where the flights to El Salvador were — on the ground in the United States, in the air, or already overseas — at the time he handed down his order.
In issuing a temporary restraining order against the removals this weekend, Judge Boasberg said any planes carrying the Venezuelan migrants had to return to the United States “however that’s accomplished — whether turning around the plane or not.”
The White House has denied that it violated the order, arguing the deportation flights departed U.S. soil before Judge Boasberg submitted his written order.
In a court filing early Monday, lawyers for some of the deported Venezuelans noted that the White House had claimed that Judge Boasberg’s order was published in written form at 7:26 p.m. on Saturday, ignoring that he had issued an oral version of the same decision around 6:45 p.m., which “unambiguously directed the government to turn around any planes carrying individuals being removed.”
The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said on Monday there were “questions about whether a verbal order carries the same weight as a legal order, as a written order, and our lawyers are determined to ask and answer those questions in court.”
Trump administration officials have also suggested that Judge Boasberg’s order did not apply to planes that were already over international waters when the written decision was handed down — a position that the lawyers for the deported immigrants sharply disagreed with.
“Whether or not the planes had cleared U.S. territory,” they wrote, “the U.S. retained custody at least until the planes landed and the individuals were turned over to foreign governments.”
Ms. Leavitt told reporters on Monday that the more than 260 deported immigrants included 137 people removed through the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, an obscure wartime law that the administration has claimed it is using to summarily deport those identified as members of the transnational Tren de Aragua gang. Another 101 were Venezuelans deported under normal immigration proceedings. Ms. Leavitt said another 23 were members of the Salvadoran gang Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13.
The United States is paying El Salvador $6 million to take in the deportees, Ms. Leavitt told reporters.
Ms. Leavitt on Monday said the group of deportees was responsible for a variety of violent crimes, including murder and sexual abuse, but the administration had not released extensive details about each deportee, and had not provided evidence of their gang affiliations. Ms. Leavitt did not commit to releasing the name of each person deported through the Alien Enemies Act.
Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee also accused the Trump administration of “another unlawful and brazen power grab” in proceeding with the deportations.
“We cannot allow Trump to flout the rules and due process,” the Senate Democrats said in a statement on Monday. “All of us, including the courts, must continue to hold this administration accountable, and prevent the Trump administration from taking us down a dark and dangerous road.”
The deportations to El Salvador were just one example of administration actions that conflicted with the positions of the judicial branch.
Over the weekend, a federal judge in Boston said there was reason to believe that the Trump administration had willfully disobeyed his order to provide the court notice before expelling a doctor who was detained for 36 hours in Boston when she returned from visiting her relatives in Lebanon even though she had a valid visa.
Despite the judge issuing an order temporarily blocking her removal, federal authorities still flew Dr. Rasha Alawieh, 34, a professor at Brown University, to Paris, presumably en route to Lebanon.
The Trump administration is facing accusations in at least three other cases that it has not fully complied with judges’ orders or is in contempt for having violated them.
In one of those cases, lawyers for a group of nonprofit organizations accused the State Department of failing to follow a court order that directed it to pay all of the money owed to them by the U.S. Agency for International Development.
In the other two cases, lawyers for a hospital in Seattle and for medical professionals in Maryland have accused the Department of Health and Human Services of failing to comply with separate court orders barring officials from withholding federal funding to health-care providers that offer gender-affirming care.
