Trump’s Criminal Contempt
Terry H. Schwadron
April 18, 2025
Federal District Court Judge James E. Boasberg in Washington showed his legal fastball Wednesday, issuing a 46-page opinion that said there is “probable cause” that the Trump administration is guilty of criminal contempt of court in ignoring court orders over deportations of Venezuelans to El Salvador.
Boasberg’s detailed argument outlined that the government acted in a willful manner to ignore his questions about using that 1798 Alien Sedition Act under emergency powers to send 130 Venezuelan gang members to the notorious prison complex in El Salvador even as he had issued his orders to stop. As a result, Boasberg threatens an inquiry towards criminal contempt.
Boasberg had questions about use of that law, and questions about due process for deportees, he said, but those flights, and several more since have continued without answers to his questions. The case complaints, meanwhile, were ordered to be refiled in Texas, which has happened, but still allows Boasberg to pursue questions about whether his initial court order was deliberately ignored.
Attorney General Pam Bondi took to Fox News, not the courtroom, to accuse Judge Boasberg of “meddling in our government,” as if the courts are not constitutionally co-equal to the executive branch.
More to the point, of course federal judges should be asking questions about what the Trump administration is doing about deportations, particularly since the last use of this law was to justify the lockup of millions of Japanese Americans during World War II. And Trump officials should be willing to defend what they are up to, not grabbing migrants off the street — wrongly in several cases — and sneaking around court orders.
It’s beneath us as Americans, as a democracy, especially as a legit basis for deportations to a hellhole for hire in El Salvador.
This week, District Court Judge Paula Xinis in Maryland, ruling in the separate deportation case involving Kilmar Abrego García started two week of inquiries that could lead to the same conclusion, since Justice Department lawyers are arguing that her order to “facilitate” returning him is beyond the power of her court to order. An appeals court yesterday strongly upheld her inquiry and was harshly critical of the Justice Department.
Yet other federal judges are starting to take up similar cases involving both migrants or hundreds of foreign students involved in protests, in which due process has been omitted for speed in hustling migrants suspected of being members of violent crime — often despite lack of charges. That includes Abrego Garcia, who faces no U.S. charges but was reported by a single report to be a member of the Salvadorean MS-13 gang at one time.
‘Criminal Contempt’ for Trump?
Just what criminal contempt could mean remains unclear. Presumably the judge or judges can demand sworn testimony towards identifying specific individuals who, as clients, ordered the Justice Department lawyers to withhold information sought by the judges. Fines or even jail time could result — likely spurring appeals and instant Trump pardons.
But the very fact that this is where we find ourselves is condemning.
On the one hand, it all seems cruelly stupid that immigration police, pushed to fill deportation quotas by Trump, could not live within the legal limits involved. Deporting those now-200 or so migrants a few days later would not have made a big difference in national safety.
But, as we are hearing repeatedly from the political pundits, this seems to be a fight that Trump wants with the courts. He wants to roll over law, whether administrative, procedural or substantive, to do whatever he wants to do about mass deportations. And he wants to do so in the most frightening ways possible, to serve as a message to the millions of undocumented in the United States to self-deport.
With tiny Republican majorities in the House and Senate and constant political pressures through money and support, Trump has neutered the Congress. He has planted political toadies in the agencies to bend the will and legal authority of agencies to support deportation efforts with private information from Social Security and the IRS. He hopes his appointees to the Supreme Court have assured him of enough support as to overrule any specific lower court findings that he opposes. Outside of government, we see Trump using broad, raw power of money and access threats to win compliance with what he wants from journalists, businesses and universities, though there is growing unrest about his doing so.
Still, Judge Boasberg’s brushback pitch of a possible contempt finding sets up another round of fighting about the future of the American democratic experiment.
Contempt from Trump
Regardless of legal rulings, this is what it feels like for a nation to be self-condemning itself to a loss of individual rights and institutional security.
Yesterday, the Supreme Court decided it would preemptively hear Trump’s case to end “birthright citizenship,” the Constitutional guaranteed clause for citizenship upon birth within the United States. It means that four of nine justices think there is a question worth pursuing beyond the written Constitution. Regardless of any outcome after a May hearing, it is a sign of the danger facing democracy.
Trump has decided that his pursuit of a “unitary theory” in the presidency has produced a welter of simultaneous fronts in which the acquisition of power is the goal, even at the price of cruelty to the disadvantaged, or to the nation’s public and private institutions. What is remarkable about these first 100 days of Trump is his impatience to just enforce his private opinions and judgments — with disdain for anything remotely resembling examination of facts or history or impact.
In that spirit, we can see headlines in the same day that in Trump’s world, DOGE sending computer hacks into personal information banks at the IRS is considered ok, there is no need to show that Harvard did anything in violation of the Civil Rights act that Trump has decided to reinterpret, or to assert that Ukraine is responsible for Russia’s invasion. Trump merely asserts that a 9–0 Supreme Court decision against his actions in reality had favored his policies. Trump insists that even truisms from Fed Chair Jerome Powell, for example, that monetary policy is hard to set in a time of changing tariffs is opposition rather than guidance for stability.
Quite apart from any finding from the judges, Trump is contemptuous of any concept of America that does not revolve around his personal opinions of anything from plastic straws and low-flush toilets to a remade world order.
In short, Trump is in contempt of America, and we should return the sentiment against someone with only his own interests and those of toadies at heart.
Some home of the free and the brave.
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