Judge Who Ordered Halt to Flights Gives DOJ a Deadline

Relations certainly aren't warming between the Trump administration and US District Judge James Boasberg, who last Saturday ordered planes carrying deportees to El Salvador to be turned around and brought back to the US. The aircraft instead landed as scheduled, and on Thursday, Boasberg "edged closer" to holding the Trump administration in contempt for possibly violating that ruling, reports the New York Times. The latest:

• A dig at the DOJ: Boasberg took the Justice Department to task for not being forthcoming with information he requested about the flights' timing: when they departed, left US airspace, and landed. He said what the DOJ ultimately provided to him on Thursday was "the same general information" it had already provided. "The government again evaded its obligations" and provided "woefully insufficient" information, he wrote in his three-page order.
• The demand: Boasberg set a Tuesday deadline for the DOJ to explain in a filing why it "did not violate the Court's Temporary Restraining Orders by failing to return class members removed from the United States on the two earliest planes that departed on March 15, 2025," reports NBC News. It must also tell him whether it plans to move forward with invoking the state secrets privilege as reason for not handing over the requested information, as DOJ lawyers suggested they might.

• The DOJ's moves: The Times reports DOJ lawyers have maneuvered to avoid Boasberg in recent days via a "last-minute effort" to cancel a hearing before him and by requesting the federal appeals court to yank him from the case entirely. (President Trump called for Boasberg to be impeached, which Chief Justice John Roberts took issue with.)
• The big legal question: Trump's decision to remove the migrants under the Alien Enemies Act, a centuries-old law intended to be used in war time, is at issue. It allows the government to remove subjects of a "hostile nation" during an invasion; the administration claims the deported migrants belong to the Tren de Aragua gang, that an influx of their members into the US constituted an invasion.
• Shaky evidence? Lawyers say many of the deported Venezuelans aren't members of the gang, and Slate reports evidence supplied by some of the lawyers indicates the men were seized in part because they had tattoos the US claims are associated with Tren de Aragua. They aren't, the lawyers say. In one case, a tattoo of a crown sitting on top of a soccer ball was a nod to the Real Madrid soccer team, per the lawyers, while another man's crown of thorns tattoo was a nod to his late grandmother, whose date of death is inked at the crown's bottom; the US claimed in both cases the tattoos signaled gang membership. Read more examples here.

(More James Boasberg stories.)