In a 2-1 ruling, an appeals court panel has blocked a federal judge from conducting a contempt inquiry into the Trump administration’s removal of Venezuelan detainees from the U.S. to El Salvador, despite a court order to turn around the planes.
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On Tuesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit wrote that the court’s order “is appropriate again to forestall unwarranted judicial intrusion into Executive Branch decision making regarding matters of national security.”
The judges stated that U.S. District Judge James Boasberg needs no further information that a contempt hearing would provide.
“The harms of further judicial investigation cannot be remedied by a later appeal,” Circuit Judges Neomi Rao and Justin Walker wrote in the majority opinion, adding that courts need to recognize the “paramount necessity of protecting the Executive Branch from vexatious litigation.”
Dissenting, Judge J. Michelle Childs wrote that Boasberg should be able to move forward with contempt proceedings.
“We are not reviewing a judgment of contempt made by the trial court, nor are we even reviewing a referral for a contempt prosecution,” she stated.
Instead, the judge’s order “is just trying to understand the events of a single weekend in March, including the actions which may have led to the willful violation of one of its orders,” Childs wrote.
This is the second time Boasberg has been blocked from trying to pursue this inquiry into the events that took place in March 2025.
Last August, the federal appeals court ruled that Boasberg abused his authority in pursuing contempt proceedings against Trump administration officials over the deportation flights carried out under the Alien Enemies Act.
In that ruling, Rao described Boasberg’s contempt order as “especially egregious” because it implicated senior government officials. His ruling also constituted an “intrusion on the president’s foreign affairs authority,” she stated.
Rao and Walker were nominated by President Donald Trump during his first administration. Childs was nominated by President Joe Biden.
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