For a long time, we’ve believed no president would dare enact the Alien Enemies Act again, not after it was abused to send more than 100,000 residents and citizens of Japanese descent to US concentration camps during the Second World War.
Even the administrative power grabs and uptick in bigotry that followed the 9/11 attacks never went as far as Trump has in his second presidential term. Trump, along with his supporters and enablers, are enacting a racial cleansing of America. That it’s been mostly bloodless so far isn’t much comfort. In fact, due to the lack of concerted push-back by any other branch of the government (a late-night order from SCOTUS notwithstanding), the only thing this bloodlessness indicates is that we’re still on the early end of the Trump 2.0 timeline
But even bad faith efforts to remove brown people from the US need some sort of excuse, no matter how unbelievable, to justify the abjectly horrible actions being taken by the Trump administration. It gives everyone involved the veneer of lawfulness they’ll need to cling to if, and more hopefully, when they’re held accountable for their actions.
The claim being used to buttress sending people who are here in this country legally to foreign prisons under the Alien Enemies Act is this: The deportees are actually enemies engaging in hostile acts under the direct supervision of a foreign, unfriendly government. Here’s how the Trump Administration has framed this flimsy argument:
Trump’s invocation of the act claims such a link: “TdA is undertaking hostile actions and conducting irregular warfare against the territory of the United States both directly and at the direction, clandestine or otherwise, of the Maduro regime in Venezuela.”
Almost no evidence has been offered to support these assertions. Similarly sloppy work is being done by federal officers, ex-cops, and private contractors to identify alleged gang members. From what we’ve seen so far, the mere presence of literally any tattoo on a detainee’s body is enough to get them shipped off to an El Salvadoran maximum security prison.
No one in the Trump administration cares how sloppy and how cruel this is. And they certainly won’t be moved by the determination of multiple US intelligence agencies, whose combined forces have yet to uncover anything linking the Venezuelan government to Tren de Aragua gang activity in the United States, much less anything that ties hundreds of detainees to activities that would justify their removal under the Alien Enemies Act.
The National Intelligence Council, drawing on the acumen of the United States’ 18 intelligence agencies, determined in a secret assessment early this month that the Venezuelan government is not directing an invasion of the United Statesby the prison gang Tren de Aragua, a judgment that contradicts President Donald Trump’s public statements, according to people familiar with the matter.
The determination is the U.S. government’s most comprehensive assessment to date undercutting Trump’s rationale for deporting suspected gang members without due process…
Even if this full assessment is made public, it won’t change anything. It’s not going to stop the Trump administration from ignoring due process rights and expelling as many foreign residents from the US as possible. All that’s guaranteed to happen is the mass firing of every intelligence official involved in generating this assessment. Bigoted sociopaths are running the country now and there’s not a single person in any position of power in this administration who gives one solitary fuck about the truth. We citizens, however, don’t have to pretend to believe Trump’s bullshit. That’s still a luxury we can afford, which is more than can be said about the billionaires and bootlickers he’s surrounded himself with, who are clearly willing to watch an entire country burn in exchange for a little bit of Oval Office access.
The Trump administration’s attempt to rendition people to El Salvador without due process has hit another judicial roadblock. Judge Charlotte Sweeney in Colorado has blocked the government from using the improper Alien Enemies Act to remove noncitizens from the US without due process.
The administration’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act is both legally absurd and morally offensive. The history of the Alien and Sedition Acts is a shameful moment in American history, with three of the four acts long since repealed or expired. The surviving Alien Enemies Act has only been used three times in our history — during actual declared wars — and each use represents a stain on American principles of due process.
But here, it’s even worse. The administration isn’t even pretending there’s a real war. Instead, Trump simply declared by executive fiat that a Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua (TdA), constitutes an “invading force” under the control of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro — a transparently false claim that ignores both reality and the Constitution’s assignment of war powers to Congress.
The court methodically dismantles the administration’s attempt to redefine basic constitutional concepts. Judge Sweeney explains that “invasion” has always meant military action by another nation — not, as the administration claims, criminal activity by a gang. The ruling points out (quoting other rulings) that this understanding of invasion “echoes throughout the Constitution” and “in every instance, it is used in a military sense.” The administration’s attempt to characterize TdA’s activities as an “invasion” fails “at a bare minimum,” regardless of how dramatically the government describes the gang’s “hostile actions.”
The opinion reads like a basic civics lesson for an administration that seems to need one. The judge appears particularly unimpressed with government lawyers trying to argue that “unambiguous words are ambiguous” just to justify their novel interpretation.
Similarly, the court rejected the administration’s attempt to transform a criminal gang into a “foreign nation or government” merely by asserting links to Maduro’s regime:
At bottom, the Proclamation fails to adequately find or assert TdA is a “foreign nation or government,” § 21, sufficient to justify the Act’s invocation. Indeed, if TdA was such a “foreign nation or government,” id., there would be no need for it to “undertak[e] hostile actions . . . at the direction, clandestine or otherwise, of the Maduro regime in Venezuela,”
From there, the judge calls out the horrifying lack of due process by the US government in trying to traffic these individuals to El Salvador:
This does not, as discussed during oral argument, instruct individuals that they have a right to pursue a habeas challenge. At most, the Notice “permits” individuals to make “a phone call.” Id. (emphasis added). And while the Notice requires government employees to certify they have read the Notice to an individual “in a language he or she understands,” this does not guarantee individuals are provided the Notice in a language they understand “in a manner as will allow them to actually seek habeas relief,” J. G. G., 2025 WL 1024097, at *2.Vaguely granting someone permission to make one phone call if they ask—with, at most, a verbal read-aloud of the Notice that on its face says nothing about the right to seek habeas relief—does not rise to the level of “allow[ing] [detainees] to actually seek habeas relief in the proper venue before [their] removal occurs.”Id. (emphasis added); Mullane v. Cent. Hanover Bank & Tr. Co., 339 U.S. 306, 314 (1950) (“An elementary and fundamental requirement of due process . . . is notice reasonably calculated, under all the circumstances, to apprise interested parties of the pendency of the action and afford them an opportunity to present their objections.” … This is all the truer where, as Petitioners observe, the notice gives no timeframe for removal or even informs an individual how to contest their removal—much less, noted above, that notice judicial review could be pursued.
The judge also addresses the very different beliefs between the plaintiffs’ ACLU lawyers and the government on just how much notice people deserve to allow them to seek due process before being shipped to a foreign concentration camp. Remember, the Supreme Court explicitly said, just weeks ago, that there must be a “reasonable” amount of time for due process.
The DOJ argued that 24 hours was sufficient notice — a position that would effectively prevent any meaningful legal challenge. While the ACLU requested 30 days, the court settled on 21 days and laid out specific requirements for adequate notice:
Such notice must state the government intends to remove individuals pursuant to the Act and Proclamation. It must also provide notice of a right to seek judicial review, and inform individuals they may consult an attorney regarding their detainment and the government’s intent to remove them. Such notice must be written in a language the individual understands. These requirements are reasonable to ensure individuals are “actually inform[ed],” Mullane, 339 U.S. at 315, of their rights and the nature of proceedings against them, consistent with Supreme Court precedent on this very issue, and crafted to the “appropriate nature of the case,” see J. G. G., 2025 WL 1024097, *2 (quoting Mullane, 339 U.S. at 313. See also id. (“The notice must be afforded within a reasonable time and in such a manner as will allow them to actually seek habeas relief in the proper venue before such removal occurs.”).
In issuing the temporary restraining order, Judge Sweeney cut through the government’s arguments with a simple observation about what’s really at stake: without court intervention, these individuals face “significant risk” of being illegally trafficked to a foreign gulag. The court emphasized that its order merely enforces fundamental constitutional principles:
Practically speaking, a TRO would inflict little more on Respondents than ensure they adhere to the requirement the Supreme Court has already imposed on them: give Petitioners and putative class members adequate notice, with adequate time, to adequately pursue habeas relief
Expect the government to appeal and/or try to weasel its way out of what the judge orders here, because that’s what they’ve been doing in every one of these cases. But, for now, it’s another strong ruling against the fascist Trump administration’s efforts to disappear people to a foreign concentration camp under an inapplicable law without any due process.
The Supreme Court yesterday effectively provided the executive branch with a technical manual for legally disappearing people to foreign slave labor camps. While claiming to require “due process,” the Court’s ruling dismantles real protections by treating fundamental human rights violations as mere procedural technicalities that can be overcome with minimal paperwork.
We’ve been covering this administration’s attempts to create a program of trafficking people to El Salvadoran slave labor camps — from their claims that due process doesn’t apply to their mockery of judges who try to stop them. Now the Supreme Court has provided its blessing for the government’s abuse of the horrific Alien Enemies Act, so long as the government follows a few minimal procedures.
The Court’s ruling in the challenge to the administration’s Alien Enemies Act trafficking scheme dissolves Judge Boasberg’s injunction while pretending to care about due process. The Court’s sole concession? People must get a “reasonable” amount of time to file individual habeas petitions before being disappeared — a theoretical protection that will prove meaningless for most victims who lack the resources or legal representation to file complex federal court challenges in time.
Some courts still understand what’s at stake. The same day in a separate case, the Fourth Circuit upheld an order requiring the return of Abrego Garcia from El Salvador. Judge Stephanie Thacker cut through the procedural nonsense:
The United States Government has no legal authority to snatch a person who is lawfully present in the United States off the street and remove him from the country without due process. The Government’s contention otherwise, and its argument that the federal courts are powerless to intervene, are unconscionable
Even stalwart conservative Judge Wilkinson, while quibbling over whether courts can demand (versus ordering the US government to “facilitate”) Garcia’s return, acknowledged the government’s fundamental error in that case. But while that battle continues — with Roberts putting the order on hold for more briefing today — the Supreme Court has already made its broader position clear. In dissolving Judge Boasberg’s injunction against the entire trafficking program, the Court revealed its deeply troubling approach to fundamental human rights.
The Court’s approach is concerning on multiple levels. First, as habeas expert Lee Kovarsky details in a devastating analysis, the majority deliberately misrepresents precedent, conflating ordinary detention cases with state-sponsored human trafficking to pretend this extraordinary situation fits neatly within normal habeas doctrine. This intellectual dishonesty enables human rights violations while providing only the thinnest veneer of due process — requiring individual habeas petitions that the Court knows most victims won’t have the resources or legal representation to file in time.
The Court’s four female justices, in dissent, lay bare the majority’s stark hypocrisy. Justice Sotomayor’s dissent is particularly devastating, pointing out an absurd contradiction: while all nine justices agreed that even alleged gang members deserve due process, the majority simultaneously dissolved an order preventing people from being trafficked without any process at all. As she writes:
In light of this agreement, the Court’s decision to intervene in this litigation is as inexplicable as it is dangerous. Recall that, when the District Court issued its temporary restraining order on March 15, 2025, the Government was engaged in a covert operation to deport dozens of immigrants without notice or an opportunity for hearings. The Court’s ruling today means that those deportations violated the Due Process Clause’s most fundamental protections. See ante, at 3 (reiterating that notice and an opportunity for a hearing are required before a deportation under the Alien Enemies Act). The District Court rightly intervened to prohibit temporarily the Government from deporting more individuals in this manner, based on its correct assessment that the plaintiffs were likely entitled to more process. 2025 WL 890401, *2.
Against the backdrop of the U. S. Government’s unprecedented deportation of dozens of immigrants to a foreign prison without due process, a majority of this Court sees fit to vacate the District Court’s order. The reason, apparently, is that the majority thinks plaintiffs’ claims should have been styled as habeas actions and filed in the districts of their detention. In reaching that result, the majority flouts well-established limits on its jurisdiction, creates new law on the emergency docket, and elides the serious threat our intervention poses to the lives of individual detainees.
Basically: if we all agree that the government has to give everyone due process, why the fuck is the majority getting rid of the district court’s order that required exactly that?
The majority’s actions are doubly troubling because they’re using the shadow docket — generally meant for genuine emergencies and (usually) maintaining the status quo — to create sweeping new law without proper briefing. This isn’t just procedurally suspect, it’s dangerous. The Court is fundamentally reshaping the government’s power to traffic people to foreign slave labor camps without the careful consideration and full briefing such a momentous change demands.
Justice Jackson’s dissent captures the gravity of this abuse:
The President of the United States has invoked a centuries-old wartime statute to whisk people away to a notoriously brutal, foreign-run prison. For lovers of liberty, this should be quite concerning. Surely, the question whether such Government action is consistent with our Constitution and laws warrants considerable thought and attention from the Judiciary. That was why the District Court issued a temporary restraining order to prevent immediate harm to the targeted individuals while the court considered the lawfulness of the Government’s conduct. But this Court now sees fit to intervene, hastily dashing off a four-paragraph per curiam opinion discarding the District Court’s order based solely on a new legal pronouncement that, one might have thought, would require significant deliberation.
The contrast could not be starker: four justices recognize this as a defining moment for American human rights and due process, while the majority treats state-sponsored human trafficking as a mere administrative puzzle to be solved through casual procedural hairsplitting. It’s not just the majority’s callous disregard for human rights that’s shocking — it’s their seeming inability to even recognize the gravity of what’s at stake.
History will judge this moment harshly. When faced with an unprecedented executive power grab to disappear people to foreign slave labor camps, the Supreme Court’s majority responded not by defending fundamental constitutional rights, but by writing a technical manual for how to make human trafficking technically legal. In doing so, they’ve failed not just the immediate victims of this program, but their core duty to protect basic human rights and liberty against government overreach.
There comes a moment in every collapsing democracy when absurdity and menace fuse into something uniquely destabilizing—a phenomenon I’m tempted to call “malignant farce.” We’ve reached that moment. The President of the United States, after invoking a 1798 wartime law to mass-deport migrants to a third country, now claims he didn’t do it. “Other people handled it,” he told reporters, despite his signature appearing on the document.
This is not merely a lie—though it is certainly that—but something more fundamentally corrosive: the introduction of the Toddler Theory of Presidential Power. Like a child caught with his hand in the cookie jar insisting “I didn’t do it,” Trump has advanced the novel constitutional principle that presidential actions somehow occur without presidential agency. Documents bearing his signature, orders issued under his authority, and policies implemented by his administration apparently materialize through some mysterious process for which he bears no responsibility.
The obvious absurdity of this claim would be comedic if it weren’t deployed to evade accountability for using the Alien Enemies Act—a law intended for declared wars against nations, not immigration enforcement—to justify mass deportations that a federal judge has already ruled likely unconstitutional. We have now entered territory where the head of the executive branch simultaneously claims the power to ignore judicial rulings while denying responsibility for the very actions judges are ruling against.
This isn’t just a president lying—a common enough occurrence in any administration. This is a president who wishes to exercise power without accountability, who signs documents then disclaims knowledge of their contents, who demands obedience to his authority while disavowing his own actions. It is the logic of the autocrat who wishes to be unbound by any constraint while maintaining plausible deniability for the consequences.
The pathetic spectacle of a president who claims vast powers while shirking basic responsibility reveals the infantile core of authoritarianism. For all its pretensions to strength and decisiveness, the authoritarian personality cannot bear the weight of consequence, cannot accept that power entails responsibility, cannot face the fundamental reality that actions have effects for which one might be accountable.
Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And a president’s signature on an executive order means he ordered it. These are not complicated truths, yet their denial suggests something profoundly broken in our political system. When the most powerful person in the country can point to his own signature and say “I didn’t do that,” we’ve moved beyond normal political dishonesty into the realm of reality dissolution.
The Founders designed a system based on the assumption that those in power would at least acknowledge their own actions, even if they abused their authority. They never envisioned a president who would simultaneously claim unlimited power while disavowing the exercise of that very power—a constitutional Schrödinger’s cat, both authoritarian and abdicated, depending on which serves his interests in the moment.
This is the essence of despotism—not the iron fist, but the infantile will that demands absolute authority without corresponding responsibility. It is, as Hannah Arendt recognized, the banality of evil clothed in the childish refusal to acknowledge reality itself.
If there is any comfort to be taken from this spectacle, it is the realization that such profound dishonesty reveals not strength but weakness. A president secure in his authority and confident in his actions would not need to deny his own signature. He would not hide behind the claim that “other people handled it.” He would own his decisions, defend them on their merits, and accept the constitutional constraints that make a president a democratic leader rather than a petulant monarch.
But comfort is cold indeed when the lie is in service of violating human rights, defying court orders, and systematically dismantling constitutional governance. The Presidential Toddler Theory may be absurd, but its consequences are deadly serious. And recognizing the absurdity, while necessary, is no substitute for confronting the danger.
Mike Brock is a former tech exec who was on the leadership team at Block. Originally published at his Notes From the Circus.
Trump seems very interested in speed-running the martial law curve. His previous term in office saw him suggesting the military should help quell anti-police violence protests around the nation, as well as participating in his undeclared war on immigration by aiding in the policing of our southern border.
With Trump taking office for a second time, every bad idea is now worse. Right now, the administration is using a 225-year-old law to justify its unlawful immigrant removal efforts. The 1798 law (one that has no expiration date) was passed to grant the government additional powers to remove enemies of the state in times of war.
Its previous invocations demonstrate when it’s (possibly) prudent to invoke this act. During the War of 1812, it was used to report and remove British nationals. In World War I and World War II, it was used to detain or remove foreign non-citizens. In the latter case, it led directly to one of the most shameful periods in US history — one in which more than 100,000 US residents of Japanese descent were sent to concentration camps located inside the United States for the duration of the war.
That alone should have been enough to keep any post-WWII president from invoking the Alien Enemies Act. But Trump and his enablers are not regular people. They are hateful, spiteful, performative, and completely unworthy of the power they have been gifted with.
The invocation of this power to “justify” the mass deportation of immigrants to whatever foreign country will take them is a deliberate attempt to bypass judicial review of Trump’s deportation programs, which have already been met with injunctions blocking further expulsions.
While controversy immediately arose over whether the administration had defied a court order to stop the deportation flights, the more important question will soon demand an answer: whether the Alien Enemies Act applies at all. The act grants sweeping powers to the executive branch but only during a time of declared war or “invasion or predatory incursion” by “a foreign nation or government.” President Trump will have to make a difficult case that TdA [Tren de Aragua] and other gangs act at the behest of foreign nations that are conducting an invasion of the United States.
Yoo thinks Trump can’t actually make this case. It takes a declared war to invoke this act. But no war has been declared here. Instead, Trump simply insists that mere (alleged) presence of foreign gang members in the US is all the “invasion” or “predatory incursion” he needs to declare war, without… you know… actually getting Congress involved and officially declaring war.
Yoo’s article argues there’s nothing there to support Trump’s assertions. Tellingly, he quotes possibly the only thing that might make that case for Donald Trump, even if Trump himself isn’t smart enough to make this argument on his own. And, of course, it’s from the same entity behind the Project 2025 effort — one that deliberately aims to consolidate executive power at the expense of literally everything and everyone that doesn’t fit into its ghastly, narrow-minded view of the future.
In support of the administration, one could cite a Heritage Foundation report that states that “the goal of the TdA, whether in Chile or the United States, is to establish territorial control to impose a criminal economy that connects illicit networks from urban and suburban areas to penitentiaries in or near those neighborhoods.” According to that report, “once an uptick in crime and violence in a local neighborhood is detected and attributed to Venezuelan migrants, the presence of the TdA is probably already established.”
That appears to be the rationale the Trump administration is using: any signs of violence linked to foreign gangs is enough to trigger a state of war and the executive branch’s ability to wield war powers.
As Yoo sees it, it will likely accomplish exactly what Trump wants: an immediate boost in power and reduced friction from the federal court system. But the long game won’t work out in Trump’s favor, and it’s definitely going to do a lot of long-term damage to the reputation of the US and millions of people who currently reside in this country.
[T]he cost would be the creation of a state of war between the United States and Venezuela. If the United States has been invaded by Venezuelan agents, then the president can go to war in national self-defense without need of a congressional act or declaration of war. Washington could not only detain any and all Venezuelan citizens within the United States but also use military force against Caracas. It could take lethal action against the Venezuelan military, invade and occupy Venezuelan territory, and overthrow the Maduro regime. And Venezuela could try to do the same to the United States.
We hold no brief for Venezuela; the country’s people and the region would be far better off if Maduro fell and were replaced by the democratically elected opposition. But it may not be worth backsliding into a state of war to expedite the removal of illegal aliens, who could be deported under regular immigration laws anyway. Such a symbolic show of resolve on illegal immigration could hamper Trump’s effort to revive the Monroe Doctrine and win the cooperation of Latin American leaders to reduce illegal immigration and drug-trafficking.
While it’s not as full-throated as one would hope in terms of criticizing Trump’s bold and buffoonish invocation of war powers, it’s probably the best we can expect from someone who has always been supportive of CIA torture efforts and, presumably, its occasional foreign government coups.
Trump seems intent on going to war with most of the world, whether its a militaristic show of force, a handy way to consolidate power, or simply by escalating hostilities via public statements and vindictive tariffs that have done nothing more than alienate many of our long-term allies.
Martial law, it may end up being. At the very least, we should definitely expect some form of police state to arise from this situation if the courts can’t shut these efforts down.
This isn’t the only problem with Trump’s War on Immigrants. It now appears the DOJ feels this war power invocation means immigration enforcement agencies (and their local law enforcement partners) will no longer need to worry about the Fourth Amendment.
Trump administration lawyers have determined that an 18th-century wartime law the president has invoked to deport suspected members of a Venezuelan gang allows federal agents to enter homes without a warrant, according to people familiar with internal discussions.
[…]
“All such alien enemies, wherever found within any territory subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, are subject to summary apprehension,” the proclamation said.
Senior lawyers at the Justice Department view that language, combined with the historical use of the law, to mean that the government does not need a warrant to enter a home or premises to search for people believed to be members of that gang, according to two officials familiar with the new policy.
Swell. That means any home in an area where officers believe some gang members might reside can be searched without a warrant. If the DOJ’s legal team buys into this bullshit, entire apartment blocks and neighborhoods will be raided. And the searches won’t stop until those doing the searching decide they’ve found all they can find or simply need to get back to the station to clock out.
Living in interesting times is fine, if occasionally stressful. But we’re living in times that are far more frightening than interesting. When even torture enthusiasts and CIA-backers think the government is going too far, it’s well past time to start worrying.
I think lots of people know the kind of person who thinks they’re more clever than they really are. The kind of person who thinks that they can outwit the system by playing stupid games. The kind of person who thinks that this kind of beating the system is because they’re smart. This kind of person is usually viewed as a dipshit. Donald Trump’s DOJ seems to be, as a group, acting like just that kind of dipshit.
Like that overconfident student who thinks they’ve discovered one weird trick to beat the system, the DOJ keeps playing increasingly transparent games in court — making patently ridiculous arguments while acting shocked and offended when judges see right through their obvious nonsense.
It is a form of contempt. Not necessarily in the legal sense. But it is a kind of obvious contempt for the very systems and institutions of our judicial system that they are supposed to be protecting as a part of the constitutional order. And while judges are often willing to give great leeway to bad actors in their courtroom, at some point the outright contempt for the court can turn into something judges will start calling out.
I’m reminded of a college classmate who exemplified this mindset perfectly. He’d spend countless hours finding elaborate ways to game every assignment and test, devising increasingly convoluted schemes to avoid doing the actual work. The irony was that his schemes typically required far more effort than simply completing the assignments properly would have taken. But he sure was proud of the ways he believed he was beating the system.
That same misguided energy now permeates Trump’s DOJ (indeed, I just looked up on LinkedIn if that classmate might now work for the DOJ — thankfully he’s not there). These officials pour tremendous effort into crafting obviously laughable legal arguments, filing misleading declarations, and playing semantic games with court orders — all while seemingly convinced of their own clever brilliance. Just like my former classmate, they’re expending more energy trying to game the system than it would take to actually fulfill their constitutional duties and serve the American people. The result is a particularly toxic form of institutional contempt — not just disregard for the courts, but a sort of smirking certainty that they’re somehow outsmarting the entire judicial system.
It is nearly impossible to keep track of all of the various lawsuits that have been filed against the plethora of illegal actions taken by the Trump administration in the last two months since inauguration (though kudos to folks like Just Security who have been tracking them as best as they can).
The Boasberg case represents a critical escalation in this pattern of contempt. While legal scholars debate what precisely constitutes a constitutional crisis, Corbin Barthold makes a compelling case that we’ve now crossed that threshold. When a federal judge explicitly orders planes carrying deportees to return and the administration simply ignores that order, we’re witnessing something qualitatively different from their usual games.
THE LONG-AWAITED CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS has now arrived. It is time for a court to say so.
On Saturday night, James Boasberg, a federal judge in the District of Columbia, issued a pair of emergency orders. The government, he had just been told at a hastily convened hearing, was removing from the country, without due process, more than a hundred alleged gang members. The planes, he learned, were already in the air. To justify this stunning move, President Trump had issued a proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.
At around 6:45 p.m., Boasberg orally ordered the planes turned around. “Any plane containing these folks that is going to take off or is in the air needs to be returned to the United States,” he ruled from the bench. “This is something that you need to make sure is complied with immediately.”
At 7:26 p.m., he issued a briefwritten orderbarring the government from relying on the Alien Enemies Act to remove noncitizens from the country.
The government ignored both orders.
This outright defiance marks a subtle, but notable, departure from the administration’s playbook the past few months. Until now, they’ve preferred more smirking forms of contempt — slow-walking court orders, playing word games with compliance, or burying judges in misleading declarations. But each of these smaller acts of contempt has apparently emboldened them toward more brazen defiance.
A second administration official said Trump was not defying the judge whose ruling came too late for the planes to change course: “Very important that people understand we are not actively defying court orders.”
This argument, that the order came too late, is nonsense. But it’s notable how the administration is trying to insist it’s actually obeying orders in court, while doing wink, wink, nod, nod stuff out of court.
The administration’s attempts to characterize this as a routine “deportation” matter represent perhaps their most cynical wordplay yet (and one the media should stop repeating, though that’s a different issue). Deportation is a legal process with established due process rights. What happened here was something far darker: the US government engaging in what amounts to human trafficking, shipping people to El Salvador as forced labor without any due process. The mask slipped entirely when El Salvador’s President tweeted “Oopsie… too late” in response to Judge Boasberg’s order — a tweet that Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Elon Musk both found amusing enough to amplify:
The full scope of what’s happening deserves to be called out directly. Start with the legal sleight-of-hand: The administration has resurrected the Alien Enemies Act, a widely disparaged authoritarian relic that only applies during “a declared war” or “invasion” — neither of which exists. They’re wielding this zombie legislation to deny basic due process rights to people on American soil, shipping them to El Salvador (not even their country of origin) to become literal slave labor — all funded by US taxpayers.
The contempt deepens with their public justification. Without due process requirements, they don’t actually have to prove their claims that these people are gang members. And they can’t — because the claims are false for many of those shipped out. Reports show that many of the deportees have no gang connections at all. Any competent law enforcement official would recognize these allegations as nonsense.
But the most chilling display comes in their response to judicial oversight: when a federal judge attempts to restore basic due process rights, the administration not only ignores his order, but the Secretary of State publicly mocks it while coordinating with their partner in human trafficking. This isn’t just contempt of court — it’s contempt for the entire concept of legal constraints on executive power.
The administration’s response to Judge Boasberg perfectly encapsulates their broader strategy: when the facts aren’t on your side, attack the judge. Their characterization of Boasberg as a “radical left lunatic partisan” would be merely laughable if it weren’t so deliberately misleading. This is the same conservative judge who repeatedly ruled in Trump’s favor in other cases — ordering Hillary Clinton’s emails released, blocking the release of Trump’s tax returns, and limiting disclosures from both the Mueller investigation and the classified documents grand jury.
The contempt here operates on multiple levels: there’s the surface-level dishonesty of painting a conservative judge as a radical leftist, but more insidiously, there’s the implicit message that any judge who dares enforce the law against Trump must be acting from partisan motives. This fits a broader pattern where the administration’s lawyers aren’t just playing games with legal arguments — they’re actively working to undermine the legitimacy of judicial oversight itself.
The Boasberg case may be the most brazen example, but it’s far from isolated. Across multiple courts, judges are increasingly witnessing this administration’s attempts to treat the judicial system like a game they can cleverly exploit. Their contempt generally takes three forms, each more concerning than the last:
First, there’s the malicious compliance playbook — taking court orders so literally they become absurd. The Social Security Administration exemplifies this approach. When Judge Ellen Hollander blocked DOGE from accessing records, interim SSA head Lee Dudek responded by threatening to shut down the entire Social Security system, claiming his entire IT staff were somehow “DOGE affiliates.” This led to an increasingly furious series of clarifications from the judge, culminating in her observation that either Dudek was lying or the DOJ lawyers were.
Second, there’s the strategy of procedural manipulation — exploiting court customs and courtesy to gain tactical advantages. Take the EPA case, where officials used procedural games to try to circumvent judicial oversight. They asked for a routine 24-hour extension on a hearing (which opposing counsel typically grant as a professional courtesy), then used that delay to sneak in actions that would have been prevented by the pending TRO:
Third, we’re seeing increasingly more open defiance of court orders, coupled with attempts to delegitimize any judge who rules against them. The Perkins Coie case perfectly demonstrates this escalation. When Judge Beryl Howell issued a TRO blocking an obviously unconstitutional executive order targeting the law firm for representing Democratic interests, Attorney General Pam Bondi and OMB Director Russell Vought responded with explicit defiance:
The Executive Branch’s position is that Executive Order 14230 is permissible, and that the Court’s order was erroneous. The government reserves the right to take all necessary and legal actions in response to the “dishonest and dangerous” conduct of Perkins Coie LLP, as set forth in Executive Order 14230.
At the same time, the DOJ is trying to disqualify Judge Howell for… “hostility” towards the President, again setting up the idea that any judicial action holding them to account is driven by bias, rather than an actual respect for the Constitution.
The pattern of contempt continues across other cases, each fitting into these three categories of increasingly brazen defiance:
More malicious compliance games appear in the DOGE leadership saga, where pretend DOGE boss Amy Gleason filed a declaration claiming to run the agency even as Trump himself said in his address to Congress that Elon Musk runs it. When called on this discrepancy, Gleason’s response dripped with technically-accurate-but-misleading wordplay: “Elon Musk does not work at USDS. I do not report to him, and he does not report to me. To my knowledge, he is a Senior Advisor to the White House.” The contempt deepened when it emerged that Gleason was simultaneously appointed as an HHS consultant a week after being named DOGE head.
The EPA case shows how procedural games escalate to outright dishonesty. EPA boss Lee Zeldin, fixated on a deceptively edited Project Veritas video, illegally froze a Citibank account, and attempted to launch a grand jury investigation. When challenged in court, DOJ lawyers told Judge Tanya Chutkan they couldn’t provide evidence of any criminal violation because “this Court is not in a position to rule upon whether or not this termination was consistent with the contracts.”
Perhaps most telling is the transgender military ban case, where the administration’s contempt for judicial oversight is laid bare. The DOJ keeps insisting to the judge that there is no ban on transgender service members, while Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth openly declares exactly the opposite:
These examples paint a clear picture of an administration that, like my college classmate from years ago, believes it’s brilliantly outsmarting the system while actually just making itself look increasingly desperate to avoid any accountability. But unlike that student’s academic games, these legal shenanigans carry profound constitutional implications.
What started as wannabe-clever-but-obvious attempts to circumvent court orders has evolved into something far more dangerous: a systematic effort to delegitimize judicial oversight itself. Each time they respond to a court order with malicious compliance, procedural manipulation, or outright defiance, they’re not just showing contempt for individual judges — they’re undermining the very concept of judicial review.
The progression is clear: first came the word games and barely-technically-accurate-but-misleading declarations, then the exploitation of court procedures and customs, and now increasingly open defiance coupled with attempts to paint any judge who enforces the law as politically biased. This is how institutional guardrails get dismantled — not through dramatic confrontation, but through a thousand small acts of contempt that gradually normalize the idea that court orders are merely suggestions to be cleverly evaded.
Trump has already effectively neutered congressional oversight. Now his DOJ appears determined to do the same to the judiciary, treating federal judges like frustrated professors whose rules are just obstacles to be gamed. But unlike my former classmate’s academic adventures, the stakes here aren’t just a passing grade — they’re the continued functioning of our constitutional system of checks and balances.
Judges are starting to catch on, calling out these games with increasing fury. But judicial anger alone won’t be enough. An administration that responds to court orders with winks, nods, and “technically accurate” lies isn’t demonstrating clever lawyering — it’s showing fundamental contempt for constitutional governance itself. Those who shrug this off as mere legal gamesmanship are missing the escalating danger: when government lawyers treat the judicial branch as a system to be cleverly gamed rather than an essential check on power, they’re not just failing their professional obligations. They’re actively participating in the dismantling of judicial review itself.
These officials seem convinced they can keep playing these games forever — or at least until there’s no independent judiciary left to play games with. At some point, judges need to stop writing angry opinions and start issuing contempt charges. And Congress needs to wake the fuck up before it’s too late.
