Court orders DC judge to end criminal contempt inquiry into Trump officials involved in deportation flights

A divided federal appeals court on Tuesday ordered US District Judge James Boasberg to end his efforts to hold Trump administration officials accountable for flouting his orders in a high-stakes immigration case.

The decision comes almost exactly a year after Boasberg, the chief judge of the federal trial-level court in Washington, DC, said in a blockbuster ruling that “probable cause exists to find the government in criminal contempt” for defying his orders to temporarily halt the deportation of migrants under a powerful wartime authority invoked by President Donald Trump.

The Trump administration appealed several times to the DC Circuit Court of Appeals so the contempt proceedings never fully got underway, halting the judge’s work while it considered whether he had the power to move ahead with the inquiry.

But now, a pair of Trump appointees on the appellate court has decided to fully stamp out Boasberg’s plans, saying in a sharply worded opinion that his contempt probe represented “a clear abuse” of power given that the administration had previously identified then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem as the official responsible for deciding to allow the deportations in question to continue.

“The district court proposes to probe high-level Executive Branch deliberations about matters of national security and diplomacy. These proceedings are a clear abuse of discretion,” Neomi Rao and Justin Walker, who are appeals court judges, said in the unsigned opinion.

“The district court has launched an intrusive criminal contempt investigation into whether the government acted willfully when it transferred suspected Tren de Aragua members to Salvadoran custody. But the end of this investigation is a legal dead end,” the court said.

Judge Michelle Childs, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, dissented.

This story is developing and will be updated.