How the White House ignored a judge's order to turn back deportation flights

The Trump administration says it ignored a Saturday court order to turn around two planeloads of alleged Venezuelan gang members
-- because the flights were over international waters and therefore the ruling "didn't apply", two senior officials tell Axios.

Why it matters:
The administration's decision to defy a federal judge's order is exceedingly rare and highly controversial.

"Court order defied. First of many as I've been warning and start of true constitutional crisis,"
national security attorney Mark S. Zaid,
a Trump critic, wrote on X,
-- adding that Trump could ultimately be impeached.

The White House welcomes that fight.

"This is headed to the Supreme Court. And we're going to win,"
a senior White House official told Axios.

A second administration official said Trump was not defying the judge whose ruling came too late for the planes to change course:

"Very important that people understand we are not actively defying court orders."

State of play:
Trump's advisers contend U.S. District Judge #James #Boasberg overstepped his authority by issuing an order that blocked the president from deporting about 250 alleged Tren de Aragua gang members under the "Alien Enemies Act of 1789".

The war-time law gives the executive extreme immense power to deport noncitizens without a judicial hearing.

But it has been little-used, and never in peacetime.

"It's the showdown that was always going to happen between the two branches of government,"
a senior White House official said.

"And it seemed that this was pretty clean. You have [[alleged]] Venezuelan gang members ... These are bad guys, as the president would say."

How it happened: White House Deputy Chief of Staff #Stephen #Miller "orchestrated" the process in the West Wing in tandem with Homeland Security Secretary #Kristy #Noem.

Few outside their teams knew what was happening.

They didn't actually set out to defy a court order.

"We wanted them on the ground first, before a judge could get the case,
but this is how it worked out,"
said the official.

The timeline:
Trump signed the executive order invoking the Alien Enemies Act on Friday night,
but intentionally did not advertise it.

On Saturday morning, word of the order leaked, officials said,
prompting a mad scramble to get planes in the air.

At 2:31 p.m. Saturday, an immigration activist who tracks deportation flights, posted on X that
"TWO HIGHLY UNUSUAL ICE flights"
were departing from Texas to El Salvador,
which had agreed to accept Venezuelan gang members deported from the U.S.

Hours later,
during a court hearing filed by the ACLU.,
Boasberg ordered a halt to the deportations and said any flights should be turned around mid-air.

"This is something that you need to make sure is complied with immediately,"
he told the Justice Department,
according to the Washington Post.

At that point,
about 6:51 p.m.,
both flights were off the Yucatan Peninsula, according to flight paths posted on X.

Inside the White House, officials discussed whether to order the planes to turn around.

On advice from a team of administration lawyers,
the administration pressed ahead.

"There was a discussion about how far the judge's ruling can go under the circumstances and over international waters and, on advice of counsel, we proceeded with deporting these thugs,"
the senior official said.

"They were already outside of US airspace. We believe the order is not applicable,"
a second senior administration official told Axios.

Yes, but:
The Trump administration was already spoiling for a fight over the Alien Enemies Act
— one of several fronts on which they believe legal challenges to the president's authority will only end up strengthening it when the Supreme Court rules in his favor.

Between the lines:
Officially, the Trump White House is not denying it ignored the judge's order,
and instead wants to shift the argument to whether it was right to expel alleged members of Tren de Aragua.

"If the Democrats want to argue in favor of turning a plane full of [[alleged]] rapists, murderers, and gangsters back to the United States,
that's a fight we are more than happy to take,"
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told Axios when asked about the case.

It's unclear how many of the roughly 250 Venezuelans were deported under the Alien Enemies Act
and how many were kicked out of the U.S. due to other immigration laws.

It's also not clear whether all of them were actually gang members.

https://www.axios.com/2025/03/16/trump-white-house-defy-judge-deport-venezuelans

Lee Zeldin is an ambitious man.

The former congressman, who left office in 2022 to get routed by Kathy Hochul in the New York governor’s race, has only been head of the the Environmental Protection Agency for three weeks.
But he’s already looking to make a name for himself.

Luckily his former House colleague #Kristi #Noem,
currently the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, has provided a template.

After a grossly misinformed tweet by #Elon #Musk accusing New York of misappropriating disaster relief funds to house illegal migrants in luxury hotels, Noem snatched $80 million from the city of New York’s bank account.

The money had been congressionally allocated and was being used exactly as intended.

But Noem took a victory lap, blustering on X,
“Mark my words: there will not be a single penny spent that goes against the interest and safety of the American people.”

And #Lee #Zeldin said, CAN DO!

The babyfaced politician warned of “an extremely disturbing video circulated two months ago featuring a Biden EPA political appointee talking about how they were ‘tossing gold bars off the Titanic,’ rushing to get billions of your dollars out the door before Inauguration Day.”

“The gold bars were your tax dollars!” he intoned indignantly, adding that “tossing them off the Titanic meant the Biden administration knew they were wasting it.”

This leap of logic is sadly the least ridiculous part of this episode.

Because the “disturbing video” was made by #Project #Veritas, the rightwing smear factory that specializes in deceptively edited videos of Democrats.

In this case, the outfit appears to have secretly filmed a former EPA advisor in a bar talking about the rush to disburse clean energy funds before Trump took over and gutted the place.

The advisor’s fears were well-founded: Just hours after his inauguration,
Trump demanded that the government halt distribution of congressionally-allocated funds,
purporting to unilaterally cancel the grants and contracts that he didn’t like.
And he continues to do it despite multiple court orders instructing him to knock it off.

Zeldin was unbothered by the video’s sordid provenance.

He gleefully seized on the “gold bars” turn of phrase to raise his own profile,
while attempting to ingratiate himself with #Musk by crediting the #DOGE bros with the discovery.

In interviews with conservative outlets like #Newsmax and the Washington Free Beacon, he hyped the story, even concocting a stringboard theory to connect it to Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams.

“ICYMI: Administrator Lee Zeldin Finds Gold Bars from EPA at Stacey Abrams’ Connected Group, Biden-Harris Ethical Red Flags,” an EPA press release trumpeted,
attaching Zeldin’s press clippings like a campaign webpage.

Unsurprisingly, Zeldin was also repeatedly given free rein to lie to his heart’s content on #Fox.

On Maria Bartiromo’s show, he went as far as to allege that the lawful distribution of congressionally appropriated funds is tantamount to a “criminal scheme.”

https://www.publicnotice.co/p/lee-zeldin-stacey-abrams-gold-bars?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web