by Charlotte Hazard
U.S. District Judge James Boasberg ruled Wednesday that “probable cause exists” to hold Trump administration officials in criminal contempt after they violated his orders by continuing deportation flights, according to CNN. The ruling follows the Supreme Court determining that Boasberg’s court was in an improper venue for the case altogether.
Boasberg halted the administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelans that were allegedly gang members.
“The Court ultimately determines that the Government’s actions on that day demonstrate a willful disregard for its Order, sufficient for the Court to conclude that probable cause exists to find the Government in criminal contempt,” Boasberg wrote in his decision.
“The Court does not reach such conclusion lightly or hastily; indeed, it has given Defendants ample opportunity to rectify or explain their actions,” the decision reads. “None of their responses has been satisfactory.”
The Trump administration has been conducting deportation flights of alleged gang members of Tren de Aragua to prisons in El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act.
Boasberg ordered the administration to stop the flights in an oral decree from the bench, but the administration refused on the grounds that it wasn’t in his written order.
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Charlotte Hazard is a reporter for Just the News.
“You seem to consider the judges the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions; a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy. Our judges … and their power [are] the more dangerous as they are in office for life, and are not responsible, as the other functionaries are, to the elective control. The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with the corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots. It has more wisely made all the departments co-equal and co-sovereign within themselves … . When the legislative or executive functionaries act unconstitutionally, they are responsible to the people in their elective capacity. The exemption of the judges from that is quite dangerous enough. I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society, but the people themselves.”
—Thomas Jefferson
As, for the safety of society, we commit honest maniacs to Bedlam, so judges should be withdrawn from their bench, whose erroneous biases are leading us to dissolution. It may indeed injure them in fame or in fortune; but it saves the republic, which is the first and supreme law. —Thomas Jefferson