As President Donald Trump moves at a furious pace to implement his agenda, federal courts are struggling to pause actions that may be unlawful. That dynamic reached another chaotic height this past weekend as the Trump administration seeks to further its policy of mass deportations.
Over a 24-hour period that featured arrests, deportations, lawsuits, and apparent trolling from a foreign leader, lawyers and judges scrambled to respond to the administration’s efforts to remove immigrants it claims to be especially dangerous.
What happened exactly is still unclear. But the events represent the new logistical – and constitutional – strains being placed on the United States’ judges and courts.
Why We Wrote This
As President Trump implements his agenda at lightning speed, a growing number of judges tell him to roll back those actions until lawsuits can be heard. So far, the injunctions are drawing mixed responses from the executive branch.
In two cases, court orders meant to temporarily block the White House deportations have, at best, not arrived in time. At worst, the court orders have been ignored. Judges in both cases are now working through the particulars, but legal experts say that either scenario has troubling implications.
The Trump administration “has really taken to heart the motto of ‘move fast and break things,’” says Daniel Farber, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley law school.
This has led to some losses in court, he adds, but “Even if they’re eventually told to stop what they’re doing, or to reverse what they’re doing, just the fact that they’ve done it has an impact.”
Pushback from Chief Justice Roberts
As President Trump’s administration moves fast and breaks things, observers worry that the balance of powers could be among those things getting broken.
“Courts are not going to stop us,” said Tom Homan, Mr. Trump’s “border czar,” in a Fox News interview earlier this week that raised alarm bells. “We’re going to make this country safe again.”
President Trump then followed Mr. Homan’s volley with a call on Tuesday for a judge who ruled against his administration to be impeached – the fourth judge to face impeachment threats after ruling against Trump policies. In a rare public rebuke to the president, U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts fired back: “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision,” he said in a statement.
The question of courts maintaining an administrative and legal status quo, while Trump administration actions are litigated, has arisen in many cases including those concerning a Lebanese work-visa holder, Venezuelan migrants, fired federal employees, and contractors owed payment for completed work.
While preliminary rulings went against him this weekend, and while there are questions over whether federal officials complied, it’s still possible that Mr. Trump ultimately prevails. But Mr. Homan’s comments after a dramatic weekend suggest that judges need to scrutinize compliance carefully.
Fast-tracked removals
On March 15, the federal government deported over 200 migrants to El Salvador, including some Venezuelans whom the government claims are members of Tren de Aragua (TdA), a violent gang founded in 2014 in a Venezuelan prison.
The deportations were fast-tracked after President Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act earlier that day. This 1798 law allows the president to unilaterally deport citizens of a country at war with the U.S., and Mr. Trump has claimed that TdA is “conducting irregular warfare against” the United States. A lawsuit challenging that claim quickly followed, brought by five alleged TdA gang members. But during a hearing that night on the case in Washington, two planes full of migrants left Texas and began flying south.
Later that evening – after, it seems, Judge James Boasberg temporarily blocked the deportations and ordered the government to call back planes carrying them out – the two aircraft landed in El Salvador.
The next morning, Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele posted on social media a picture of a headline about Judge Boasberg’s order. “Oopsie,” he wrote. “Too late.” By Sunday afternoon, President Bukele’s office had released video clips believed to be images of migrants being escorted off a plane and taken to a prison where incarcerated people are reportedly subjected to torture and beatings.
Secretaria de Prensa de la Presidencia/Reuters
A doctor barred from re-entering the U.S.
Similar confusion broke out in Massachusetts last weekend when Dr. Rasha Alawieh, a Brown University assistant professor and kidney specialist living in the U.S. on a specialist worker visa, was denied entry into the country after a monthlong trip to her native Lebanon. U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents stopped her after finding materials “sympathetic” to Hezbollah on her phone, according to court documents filed by the government this week.
In the hours that followed, Judge Leo Sorokin issued an order that Dr. Alawieh was not to be moved without 48 hours’ notice pending a review of her case. But the next day, she was put on a flight to Lebanon via Paris. Prosecutors said that CBP agents had not heard about the court order when they did so, according to court filings.
“At no time would [U.S. Customs and Border Protection] not take a court order seriously,” a CBP official wrote in a sworn declaration.
The government response in the TdA case has been different. In a hearing in that case on Monday, the government argued that Judge Boasberg lost jurisdiction over the El Salvador flights once they left U.S. airspace.
“I think it’s pretty clear that my equitable powers don’t stop at the water’s edge, at the airspace’s edge,” Judge Boasberg responded. “Isn’t the response to what you perceive as an unconstitutional or improper order to appeal it,” he added, “rather than going forward and saying, ‘We’ll do what we want’?”
Troy A. Sambajon/The Christian Science Monitor
To follow rules, or not to follow rules?
Conservatives argue that these fast-paced actions are a necessary response after four years of soft immigration enforcement under President Joe Biden.
“President Trump is using every tool he has to expedite the removal of people,” says Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform. “Maybe he will be successful with this process; maybe he won’t.”
But fast-paced executive actions, as seen this past weekend, can risk at least the appearance of judicial orders being ignored. Now, compliance with court orders on immigration actions and others is something federal judges around the country are wading into.
These are complex, granular issues far removed from the important questions, such as whether Mr. Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act is lawful. But legal experts say judicial review here is critical to the balance of powers underpinning U.S. democracy.
“An understanding that government agencies, government actors, will abide by federal court rulings [is] fundamental to our system of government,” says Denise Gilman, co-director of the Immigration Clinic at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law.
One case on federal workers, another on USAID payments
The trend appears to be that the executive branch is straddling the line between obeying the courts and waiting for appeals or delaying making the ordered changes.
In two cases, for example, the Trump administration has been ordered to rehire probationary employees fired over the past two months. But court filings the government submitted on Monday revealed that of the roughly 24,500 employees terminated by the government, almost all have been rehired and then immediately placed on administrative leave.
In another case, Judge Amir Ali has ordered the government to make payments from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) for work already completed before administration officials paused all payments from the agency. Trump administration lawyers have said those payments have since been unfrozen. But they’re now being reviewed case by case before being released.
Judge Ali said earlier this month that he is working to ensure that the government complies with the payments order while “ensuring that due regard is given to feasibility.” In a status report last week, the organizations that brought the suit claimed they are still awaiting $228 million in payments for work completed before the initial USAID funding pause.
The government said it expects to finish processing the payments this week. Another status report is due today.
That same kind of legal standoff is ongoing under Judge Sorokin in Massachusetts and Judge Boasberg in Washington, D.C.
“All of this is sort of nitpicky procedural stuff,” says Professor Farber. But if a judge wants to determine if the government “deliberately disobeyed” their order, he adds, “the judge is going to have to deal with all those arguments.”
Editors’s note: This story was updated to note that U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents, not Border Patrol agents, interacted with Dr. Rasha Alawieh of Brown University.
