A divided federal appeals court panel has thrown out U.S. District Judge James Boasberg’s bid to pursue criminal contempt for Trump administration officials he says defied his orders in March by sending 130 Venezuelan men to a prison in El Salvador.
The ruling can be appealed further. If it remains in place, it appears to sharply diminish — but not completely rule out — the possibility that lawyers or other officials in the administration could face contempt charges over their conduct during the high-profile deportation showdown.
In the2-1 decision Friday, D.C. Circuit Judges Gregory Katsas and Neomi Rao — both Trump appointees — overturned an order Boasberg issued in April initiating the potential contempt proceedings.
The episode began when President Donald Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a rarely used wartime authority, to deport the Venezuelan immigrants to a notorious Salvadoran prison with just a few hours notice. When a handful of the men sued to block the deportations, Boasberg hastily convened a March 15 hearing and tried to halt them, saying they appeared to violate due process.
He ordered Justice Department lawyers to ensure that deportees who had already been loaded onto airplanes were not transferred out of U.S. custody. The administration nevertheless continued the deportations, deplaning the men before a bank of TV cameras that captured them being forcibly transferred to Salvadoran officials.
A month later, Boasberg found probable cause to hold the administration in contempt. The administration filed an unusual type of emergency appeal, arguing it had not defied Boasberg because his oral orders were not legally binding and he lacked authority over the planes once they left U.S. airspace.
The D.C. Circuit panel quickly paused Boasberg’s contempt-related order while the judges considered the administration’s appeal. And on Friday, the panel issued its formal ruling on the matter.
While both Katsas and Rao voted to “vacate” the contempt-related order, they disagreed about how far to go in limiting Boasberg’s future options. Katsas wrote in a solo opinion that he wanted to rule out any further criminal contempt proceedings stemming from the El Salvador deportations. Rao, by contrast, wrote her own solo opinion stopping short of foreclosing that possibility.
The third member of the appeals panel, Judge Cornelia Pillard, an Obama appointee, dissented. She said the majority’s ruling was legally unjustified and “a grave disservice” to Boasberg.
The full 11-member bench of the D.C. Circuit — which has seven Democratic appointees and four Republican appointees — could reconsider the panel’s ruling and revive Boasberg’s contempt proceedings. Lawyers for the deported men, who have since been moved to Venezuela as part of a prisoner swap brokered by the Trump administration, could also take the issue to the Supreme Court.
Advocates for the deportees rejected the panel’s decision as misguided but didn’t immediately indicate whether they would appeal.
“We strongly disagree with the ruling and are considering all options going forward,” ACLU Attorney Lee Gelernt said. “The opinion brushes aside the considerable evidence that has emerged that DOJ’s lawyers understood the order at the time and simply ignored it.”
Katsas adopted a key Trump administration argument in the dispute: that “ambiguity” in Boasberg’s directives left it unclear whether he intended to block the Trump administration from deporting only the men who remained on the U.S. mainland or whether it also applied to those who had left U.S. airspace at the time he issued the order. And Katsas said Boasberg’s contempt bid “would provoke many grave conflicts between the Judicial Branch and the Executive Branch at its highest levels.”
“The government is plainly correct about the merits of the criminal contempt, and our saying so now would prevent long disputes between the Executive and the Judiciary over difficult, contentious issues regarding the courts’ power to control foreign policy or prosecutions,” wrote Katsas, who was a deputy White House counsel during Trump’s first term.
Rao said Boasberg’s contempt order improperly intruded on the executive branch’s foreign policy powers and amounted to an attempt to strongarm the government into affording the deportees relief they’re not legally entitled to.
“Dangling this sword of Damocles to compel the Executive to exercise its foreign affairs powers exceeds the court’s authority and is an abuse of discretion,” she wrote. “What a court lacks the power to do directly, it cannot accomplish indirectly.”
Both Katsas and Rao noted that the Supreme Court ultimately rejected Boasberg’s original order, which they said eliminated his power to try to coerce the government into complying with it.
If the lawyers for the deportees appeal the panel’s ruling, they’re likely to draw inspiration from Pillard’s blistering dissent, which argued that Boasberg’s effort to pursue criminal contempt proceedings was more than justified by the Trump administration’s apparent defiance of his order.
“Our system of courts cannot long endure if disappointed litigants defy court orders with impunity rather than legally challenge them,” Pillard wrote. “That is why willful disobedience of a court order is punishable as criminal contempt.”
Pillard also said her colleagues’ ruling amounted to a slap in the face to Boasberg, an Obama appointee who became the D.C. District Court’s chief judge in 2023.
“Chief Judge Boasberg faced immense pressure to make a quick decision in a rapidly evolving, high-stakes situation. He performed that task calmly and with an even hand,” Pillard wrote.
“Even when faced with what reasonably appeared to him to be footdragging, evasion, and outright disregard for his jurisdiction and his orders, he responded with unfailing composure,” she continued. “The majority does an exemplary judge a grave disservice by overstepping its bounds to upend his effort to vindicate the judicial authority that is our shared trust.”
In a related development, another three-judge D.C. Circuit panel ruled Friday to end Boasberg’s effort to continue to seek due process for the men deported to El Salvador.
Citing the recent deal by Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele to transfer them to Venezuela, the panel found those events had overtaken Boasberg’s original order. It sent the matter back to him to reconsider his ruling in light of the development.
That appeals panel included Katsas and Rao along with Trump’s only other appointee to the D.C. Circuit, Justin Walker.
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