President Donald Trump said Tuesday on Fox News that his administration would not defy a judge’s order blocking migrant deportations, but he is confident the U.S. Supreme Court will rule in his favor if it gets involved.
U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg temporarily blocked the deportations on Saturday, the same day Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 against Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua (TdA), sending over 200 migrants to El Salvador. Questions about the timing of the block and whether it applied to a plane that was reportedly over international waters have arisen since the deportation, leading to a court battle between the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Boasberg.
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On “The Ingraham Angle,” host Laura Ingraham asked Trump if he would “defy a court order” from Boasberg.
“I never did defy a court order,” Trump said.
Ingraham continued to ask the president if he would defy an order in the future, to which Trump said that would not be allowed.
“No, you can’t do that. However, we have bad judges,” Trump said. “We have very bad judges, and these are judges that shouldn’t be allowed. I think at a certain point you have to start looking at what do you do when you have a rogue judge. The judge that we’re talking about, he’s, you look at his other rulings, I mean rulings unrelated, but having to do with me, he’s a lunatic.”
“He wants details of when flights departed and trying to, I guess they seem to be trying to lay the predicate for your administration having defied a court order,” Trump added. “Now you all have said you haven’t given specific times, and you filed a motion in court, your Justice Department, to prevent any more information getting out about specific times of flights. So that seems to be where this is going.”
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Going back and forth on Saturday evening over Boasberg’s temporary block, the D.C. judge held an emergency hearing and expanded his order to include that “all noncitizens in U.S. custody” were not to be deported. However, according to CBS News, Boasberg did not include in his updated order that any deportation flights already in the air should be returned to the U.S.
On Sunday morning, El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele confirmed that his country had received 238 members of TdA, who were then “immediately transferred to CECOT, the Terrorism Confinement Center, for a period of one year (renewable).” In addition to the 238 members, Bukele said the U.S. had sent “23 MS-13 members wanted by Salvadoran justice, including two ringleaders.”
By Monday, the federal judge asked if the Trump administration had ignored his orders from the weekend, asking Deputy Associate Attorney General Abhishek Kambli about the issue, according to The Associated Press.
Ingraham went on to ask Trump if the Supreme Court were to get involved in the case, whether he believes the court “ultimately will rule” in his favor.
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“I do, because the job of getting people out of our country that are murderers, that are absolutely the worst people, the drug lords are causing such problems in this country. Drug lords came in, the biggest of them. They left other countries to come in here. They came through an open border. They’re making millions of dollars destroying people’s lives, killing people, and that’s a presidential thing,” Trump said.
“We’re supposed to be getting them out or getting them brought to justice,” Trump added. “We had a judge, I would call him a rogue judge, you can call him whatever you want, I know nothing about him. I heard about this very late in the process, and I said, ‘That’s a strange order.’ You have local judges, local federal judges, local judges, period, and DAs and prosecutors, DAs, state attorney generals, attorney generals, that want to really take over. I think some of it’s for the publicity. They love the publicity. All of a sudden they’re on the front page of every newspaper, but they have no right to be.”
The DOJ has since refused further questioning from Boasberg, stating in a court filing Tuesday that the “Government maintains that there is no justification to order the provision of additional information,” adding that answering the judge’s requests would “disclose sensitive information bearing on national security and foreign relations.” Since the filing, Boasberg directed the DOJ to respond to his questions with a sealed court filing by noon on Wednesday.
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First published by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
