Updated March 18, 2025 at 16:24 PM ET
WASHINGTON, D.C. — A federal judge is pushing the Trump administration for more details about weekend flights that deported hundreds of alleged Venezuelan gang members, despite his order to turn the planes around.
In court filings on Tuesday, the Justice Department complied with a judge's order for a sworn declaration about how planeloads of alleged members of the Tren de Aragua gang landed in El Salvador — hours after U.S. District Judge James Boasberg issued emergency orders temporarily blocking the Trump administration from using wartime powers to quickly deport people.
Almost immediately, Boasberg gave the Justice Department another deadline for more detailed information about those flights, by noon ET on Wednesday.
The legal back-and-forth comes amid escalating tensions between the White House and the judiciary, as President Trump appeared to call for the removal of the judge overseeing the case.
Trump complained about "This Radical Left Lunatic of a Judge, a troublemaker and agitator who was sadly appointed by Barack Hussein Obama" in a post on his Truth Social platform on Tuesday. Trump did not mention Boasberg by name. But said that "This judge, like many of the Crooked Judges' I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED!!"
That prompted a rare statement from Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts.
"For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision," the court said in a statement from Roberts. "The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose."
At a hearing on Monday, lawyers for the Justice Department did not answer repeated questions from the judge about when the deportation flights took off, and exactly who was on board the planes.
That prompted Boasberg to request a sworn declaration in writing from the Justice Department.
In a court filing on Tuesday, lawyers for the Justice Department complied, providing a sworn declaration from Robert Cerna, a top official at the U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement field office in Harlingen, Texas, where the deportation flights originated.
But at the same time, Justice Department lawyers struck a defiant note, insisting that Boasberg had "no justification" to seek more information about two deportation flights that left the U.S. before his written order.
According to Cerna's statement, there were three deportation flights that left the U.S. on Saturday for El Salvador, a day after Trump signed a proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act, a rarely used authority that gives the president power to detain or deport nationals of an enemy nation during wartime or invasion.
Two of those planes left before Boasberg's written order was published at 7:25 p.m. ET, Cerna said in his sworn declaration. A third flight took off after the judge's written order, but according to Cerna, all individuals on the plane had final orders of removal and were not deported "solely on the basis of the Proclamation at issue."
DOJ lawyers also repeated some of the arguments they made at a hearing Monday, insisting the Trump administration had not violated the court's written order because the first two flights had already left U.S. airspace, while the court's earlier oral statements to turn around any planes already in the air were "not independently enforceable as injunctions."
The incident is adding to concerns among Trump's critics that the administration is openly defying the authority of federal courts, and moving the nation closer to a constitutional crisis.
The Alien Enemies Act has been used only a handful of times in U.S. history to detain or deport nationals of an enemy nation during wartime or an invasion.
The last time a president invoked the Alien Enemies Act was during World War II, when it was used to detain 31,000 people, mostly of Japanese, Italian and German ancestry.
The American Civil Liberties Union and Democracy Forward filed a lawsuit on Saturday seeking to block the deportations of five Venezuelan men, and later expanded their request to all people who could be deported under Trump's proclamation.
The ACLU argues it's illegal to use the Alien Enemies Act during peacetime for regular immigration enforcement, and that only Congress can authorize its use by declaring a state of war.
"Congress was very clear in the statute that it can only be used against a foreign government or foreign nation. It has never in our country's history been used during peacetime, much less against a gang," said Lee Gelernt, the ACLU's lead attorney on the case, in an interview with NPR.
Gelernt also questioned whether the hundreds of Venezuelan men deported to El Salvador were in fact members of Tren de Aragua or other gangs, as the Trump administration has alleged.
"These individuals did not get a hearing to show they're not members of a gang," Gelernt said.
In a court filing late Monday night, the Trump administration insisted it had good reason to believe that the men deported to El Salvador over the weekend are gang members.
"Agency personnel carefully vetted each individual alien to ensure they were in fact members of [Tren de Arugua,]" Cerna said in a declaration. "ICE did not simply rely on social media posts, photographs of the alien displaying gang-related hand gestures, or tattoos alone."
Cerna also conceded that "many" of those Venezuelan men who are now being held in a supermax prison in El Salvador do not have criminal records in the U.S. But "that is because they have only been in the United States for a short period of time," Cerna said.
"The lack of a criminal record does not indicate they pose a limited threat," according to Cerna's declaration. "The lack of specific information about each individual actually highlights the risk they pose. It demonstrates that they are terrorists with regard to whom we lack a complete profile."
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