US chief justice Roberts rejects Trump’s call to impeach judge

Washington — The Trump administration on Tuesday defended the deportation of Venezuelans after a judge temporarily banned removing people from the US under an 18th-century law, as the president’s call for the judge to be impeached drew a rebuke from the US Supreme Court’s chief justice.

US district judge James Boasberg in Washington DC on Saturday imposed a two-week halt to deportations under a proclamation by President Donald Trump invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to declare that the Venezuelan prison gang Tren de Aragua was conducting irregular warfare against the US.

The judge on Monday asked justice department lawyers to answer questions on when exactly Trump’s proclamation took effect and when the deportation flights to El Salvador took off.

Boasberg had said in court on Saturday that planes carrying deportees needed to return to the US, but they went on to land in El Salvador, fuelling concerns that the Republican president is further pushing the boundaries of executive power and setting up a potential constitutional clash with the judiciary.

In a court filing on Tuesday, responding to Boasberg’s request, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) official Robert Cerna said three planes carrying deportees departed for El Salvador on Saturday after Trump’s order was posted on the White House website that afternoon.

Only one of those flights departed after Boasberg’s two-week ban hit the public court docket at 7.25pm on Saturday, Cerna wrote in a sworn declaration. Cerna said everyone aboard that plane had separate removal orders, and thus were not deported under the Alien Enemies Act alone.

Justice department lawyers representing the Trump administration wrote that the earlier flights had departed before the judge’s written order was issued, and that spoken orders the judge had issued in court before the written notice hit the docket were not enforceable.

“There was no violation of the court’s written order (since the relevant flights left US airspace, and so their occupants were ‘removed’ before the order was issued),” the lawyers wrote.

In a post on Truth Social earlier on Tuesday, Trump called for the impeachment of the judge in the case, who he described as a far-left “troublemaker and agitator”.

The post did not identify Boasberg, an appointee of Democratic former president Barack Obama, by name.

In a rare statement, US Chief Justice John Roberts rejected the idea that impeachment is the answer for a disagreement with a jurist’s rulings.

‘Appellate review’

“For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision,” Roberts said in a statement issued by the US Supreme Court. “The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.”

Boasberg, a former prosecutor who was previously appointed by Republican president George W Bush to serve as a judge on a local Washington DC court, was confirmed by the US Senate in 2011 by a 96-0 vote. Trump’s secretary of state, Marco Rubio, was among the senators who voted to confirm him.

Trump’s post marked the first time during his second term as president that he has called for a judge’s impeachment. Congressional Republicans, the billionaire Elon Musk and other Trump allies have called for the impeachment of federal judges or attacked their integrity in response to court rulings that have slowed the administration’s moves.

Key members of the US federal judiciary warned last week of a rising number of threats directed at their colleagues, and described calls to impeach judges over their rulings as “concerning”.

Hours after Trump’s call to impeach Boasberg, Republican legislator Brandon Gill said on X that he had introduced articles of impeachment against the judge in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives.

To remove a judge from office, the House must pass articles of impeachment by a simple majority vote and then the Senate must vote by at least a two-thirds majority to convict the judge. Republicans control both chambers of Congress but do not have a two-thirds majority in the Senate.

In temporarily blocking deportations under the Alien Enemies Act on Saturday, Boasberg wrote that the law did not provide a basis for Trump’s assertion that Tren de Aragua’s presence in the US was akin to an act of war.

Tren de Aragua is a criminal organisation involved in human trafficking in South America, but despite Trump’s claim the group was invading the US, there has been little documented evidence of any large-scale operation in the country.

In his declaration, Cerna said ICE was aware of 258 other alleged Tren de Aragua members awaiting deportation in the US, including 172 who are not currently detained.

In an earlier filing, Cerna had acknowledged that many of the deported Venezuelans did not have criminal records in the US, but said one of them had been charged with murder and others with assault. He did not say how many of the 137 people removed under the Alien Enemies Act had criminal records.

Lee Gelernt, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed the request that led Boasberg to halt deportations, questioned Trump’s assertion that the deported immigrants belonged to Tren de Aragua.

“This has been a habit of the Trump administration to overstate the danger of the people they’ve arrested,” Gelernt told reporters on Monday.

Reuters