U.S. District Judge James Boasberg’s effort to investigate possible criminal contempt by Kristi Noem and other senior Trump administration officials in connection with deportation flights last year has been blocked — for the second time — by a bitterly divided appeals court panel.
In a 2-1 ruling Tuesday, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals concluded that Boasberg, the chief federal district court judge in Washington, had overstepped his authority by continuing to pursue possible contempt charges against administration officials who signed off on deportations to El Salvador despite the judge’s effort to halt them.
“The district court proposes to probe high-level Executive Branch deliberations about matters of national security and diplomacy,” Judge Neomi Rao, a Trump appointee, wrote for the majority, which also included Trump appointee Justin Walker. “These proceedings are a clear abuse of discretion.”
Judge Michelle Childs, a Biden appointee, responded in an 80-page dissent that the panel’s ruling could undermine the authority of federal courts for generations.
The ruling is a win for the administration against a judge whom President Donald Trump has sought to fashion into an adversary, with the president even calling for his impeachment over an unfavorable ruling — drawing a brushbackfrom Chief Justice John Roberts.
The dispute stems from the March 2025 effort by the Department of Homeland Security to hurriedly deport more than 100 Venezuelan nationals the administration deemed to be members of the transnational gang Tren de Aragua, relying on Trump’s unprecedented invocation of the Alien Enemies Act to justify removing them without due process. They were quickly rounded up and put on planes to El Salvador, whose president agreed to house them indefinitely in a notorious anti-terrorism prison.
Several of those targeted by Trump’s order filed an emergency lawsuit in Washington, D.C., denying that they were members of Tren de Aragua and asking the court to quickly halt efforts to deport them without due process. Boasberg, in a flurry of extraordinary and urgent weekend maneuvers, ordered a stop to the deportations and said officials should keep those already in the air in U.S. custody.
But the Trump administration rebuffed Boasberg, delivering the Venezuelan men to El Salvador’s custody in a cinematically filmed tarmac transfer touted by Trump and his allies as part of the president’s mass deportation agenda. Administration officials said Boasberg’s order could not apply to the men once they were outside U.S. airspace and pointed to ambiguity in the judge’s oral directives, which included some distinctions from his subsequent written order.
The case wound its way to the Supreme Court, which sided with the Trump administration’s argument that the original lawsuit should have been brought in Texas, where the Venezuelan men were being detained at the time they filed it, rather than in Washington, D.C.
Boasberg, an Obama appointee, continued to pursue the matter, concerned that the administration had defied his order to retain custody of the men. The same appeals court panel halted his initial contempt inquiry in a split ruling last year, but the matter was ultimately returned to Boasberg’s court for further proceedings.
Boasberg resumed his contempt inquiry, extracting from Trump administration officials that Noem, the former DHS secretary, had issued the final directive to transfer the men to Salvadoran custody despite Boasberg’s effort to halt it.
Rao said Boasberg should have stopped there.
“These proceedings improperly threaten an open-ended, freewheeling inquiry into Executive Branch decisionmaking on matters of national security that implicate ongoing military and diplomatic initiatives,” Rao wrote.
Lawyers for the ACLU, which argued on behalf of the deported Venezuelan men said they would ask the full bench of the D.C. Circuit to take up the issue.
“Our system is built on the executive branch, including the president, respecting court orders,” ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt said. “There is no longer any question that the Trump administration willfully violated the court’s order.”
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche hailed the decision, saying it should “finally end Judge Boasberg’s year-long campaign against the hardworking Department attorneys doing their jobs fighting illegal immigration.”
Rao and Walker also accepted the Justice Department’s claim that Boasberg’s directives were never actually violated because his written order only applied to immigrants not yet deported from the U.S. and the planes carrying the deportees had left U.S. airspace by the time the written order emerged.
Walker, in a concurring opinion, underscored this point, noting that Boasberg’s written order only blocked the administration “from removing” people under Trump’s proclamation and said nothing about those who were already en route. And he noted that Boasberg issued the written order precisely so that the lawyers in the rapid-fire proceedings wouldn’t need to write down his oral remarks.
Walker also took a swipe at media coverage of the case, saying reporters erroneously characterized Boasberg’s ruling as a command to turn around deportation planes, rather than including that as one of several options. Walker called it “predictably inaccurate commentary that plagues our better-first-than-accurate media era.”
But Walker also wove in praise for Boasberg, whom he described as having “a widely respected record of dispassionate decisionmaking.”
“I do not envy the position of any judge facing such time pressure to make hard and high-stakes legal decisions,” Walker wrote.
In her dissent, Childs emphasized that the Trump administration was seeking unusual relief from the appeals court by asking it to head off further proceedings, rather than following the usual course of allowing them to be completed and then filing an appeal.
“The majority has stymied the district court’s inherent and statutory powers and done so in a way that will affect not only these contempt proceedings,” she said, “but will also echo in future proceedings against all litigants.”
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