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The judge, James E. Boasberg, said he was likely to wait until next week to rule on whether the White House was in contempt of court for having ignored his order.
- April 3, 2025Updated 6:04 p.m. ET
A federal judge in Washington said on Thursday that there was a “fair likelihood” that the Trump administration had violated an order he issued last month to stop deporting Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador under an 18th-century wartime law.
Speaking at a hearing, the judge, James E. Boasberg, said that he was likely to wait until next week to issue a ruling about whether the White House was in contempt of court for having ignored his order. The announcement that he would delay a final decision came after he spent nearly an hour in a remarkable interrogation of a Justice Department lawyer.
The tense hearing, in Federal District Court in Washington, was the latest turn in a dispute between Judge Boasberg and the Trump administration, which has repeatedly attacked him for having overstepped his authority by supposedly intruding on the president’s prerogative to conduct foreign affairs.
A couple of weeks ago, Mr. Trump called for Judge Boasberg to be impeached. And in the days that followed, some of his top aides — chief among them, Attorney General Pam Bondi — have gone on television to accuse him, among other things, of being “out of control.”
But during the hearing on Thursday, Judge Boasberg, a former homicide prosecutor, was anything but out of control. Adopting the tone of an inquisitor, he led the department lawyer, Drew Ensign, through a series of questions intended to determine whether the Trump administration had hurried the Venezuelan migrants onto planes and rushed them off the runway on March 15 in an effort to avoid his order stopping them.
Judge Boasberg also grilled Mr. Ensign about a subject that was potentially even more sensitive: who in the administration knew about his order when it was handed down and who, if anyone, had given instructions for the planes transporting the migrants to El Salvador not to turn around.
