Trump’s Cronies Line Up To Help Him Defy The Judiciary

Donald Trump’s administration has openly crossed a big red line — one we’ve been tracking for some time now, as Trump and his allies openly question the judiciary’s authority to block Trump’s various lawless executive actions. The Trump administration had already slipped out of compliance with some court orders blocking executive actions, but up until this weekend, much of that was chalked up to the chaos of the DOGE rampage through much of the federal government, and of the Trump administration more generally. It was unclear how much was pointed defiance, and how much incompetence.

Then Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act over the weekend and gleefully defied a federal court order blocking any deportations under the act — deporting a group of Venezuelan nationals to El Salvador and ignoring a judge’s command that any planes already in the air turn around. It was the crossing-the-rubicon moment we’d been keeping an eye out for, as my colleague David Kurtz described it today.

A few of Trump’s closest allies have been doing the work on Monday to not just publicly justify the Trump administration’s blatant disregard for its coequal branches of government, but also to get revenge on the federal judge who blocked the deportations in the first place, and before whom the issue still sits.

During an interview on “Fox and Friends” Monday morning, Trump’s border czar Tom Homan continued pushing the White House’s claim that an airplane carrying the migrants was already in international waters when U.S. District Judge James Boasberg ordered the planes to either not leave the U.S. or return to it if they had already left — a claim that, during a hearing later on Monday, Boasberg said he found irrelevant. The Trump administration invoked the Alien Enemies Act over the weekend in response to Boasberg’s earlier order temporarily blocking five of the migrants, who were targeted as alleged members of the Tren de Aragua gang.

Homan also adopted Trump’s flippant tone, and one later employed by his DOJ, about the administration’s outright defiance of the order.

“I’m proud to be a part of this administration. We’re not stopping,” he said on Fox News Monday. “I don’t care what the judges think. I don’t care.”

At least one Trump ally in Congress is taking things a step further. Rep. Brandon Gill (R-TX) announced in a post on Twitter over the weekend that he would push to impeach Boasberg.

https://twitter.com/RepBrandonGill/status/1901097856066257071

Gill isnt the first Republican in Congress to take a stab at performative fealty by going after judges who dare to do their constitutional duty of interpreting the laws in reality-based ways — in doing so, providing a check on the Trump administration’s attempts to expand the power of the executive branch.

Last month, Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-WI) filed articles of impeachment against District Judge Paul Engelmayer, the judge who limited DOGE’s access to sensitive Treasury Department data.