Trump Admin is defying the Judge on the Venezuelan migrants deportation case…

Trump & Co. HAVE squared off against this judge in a situation that just COULD be the turning point between the Judicial Branch and the Executive Branch of the Trump admin.

Trump, who says he didn’t even sign off on this , seems to be stretching a law designed to be used against country/state level aggression for ‘so called’ gang members , in a political campaign designed for ‘Mass Detentions’ of migrants…

 

The Trump administration told a federal judge on Monday night that it would not disclose any further information about two flights of Venezuelan migrants it sent to El Salvador this month despite a court order to turn back the planes, declaring that doing so would jeopardize state secrets.

The move sharply escalated the growing conflict between the administration and the judge — and, by extension, the federal judiciary — in a case that legal experts fear is precipitating a constitutional crisis.

For almost 10 days, the judge, James E. Boasberg of the Federal District Court in Washington, has been trying to get the Trump administration to give him information about the two flights in an effort to determine whether officials allowed them to continue on to El Salvador in violation of his order to have them return to the United States.

But in a patent act of defiance, the Justice Department told Judge Boasberg that giving him any further information about the flights — which the Trump administration maintains were carrying members of a Venezuelan street gang called Tren de Aragua — would “undermine or impede future counterterrorism operations.”…

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Also on Monday, a federal appeals court in Washington held a nearly two-hour hearing on the Trump administration’s request to nullify Judge Boasberg’s underlying order, taking up many of the same issues.

The three-judge panel did not issue an immediate ruling. But during questioning, a Justice Department lawyer acknowledged that if the court were to reverse Judge Boasberg’s order, the administration could immediately resume transferring people to the Salvadoran prison.

From the moment Judge Boasberg, the chief judge of the Federal District Court in Washington, entered his original order pausing the deportation flights on March 15, Mr. Trump and his allies have accused him of overstepping his authority by intruding on the president’s prerogative to conduct foreign affairs.

The question at the heart of the case turns equally on the issue of whether Mr. Trump himself overstepped by ignoring limits set out in the text of the Alien Enemies Act and in the Constitution for when and how wartime deportations can take place….

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Lawyers for Venezuelan migrants have maintained that the law cannot be used against Tren de Aragua members because the gang is not a government and its activities do not amount to an invasion. Notably, the U.S. intelligence community circulated an assessment last month concluding that the gang is not under the control of the Venezuelan government, contrary to what Mr. Trump has since contended.

The lawyers have also questioned whether many of the migrants the Trump administration has accused of belonging to Tren de Aragua are actually members of the gang. They have argued that the Venezuelans should be able to challenge those determinations before being flown out of the country…

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During the hearing on Monday before the appeals court panel, two of the judges seemed to agree that the migrants the government wants to remove under the law could go to court to challenge whether they were actually members of Tren de Aragua.

But it was unclear what those challenges might look like.

One of the judges, Patricia A. Millett, a Democratic appointee, signaled skepticism with the government’s position that the panel should stay Judge Boasberg’s restraining order….

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The Justice Department’s invocation of the state secrets privilege was only its latest effort to stonewall Judge Boasberg’s attempts to understand whether the government had violated his order.

Last week, just hours before a hearing in which they were going to have to discuss the flight, department lawyers moved to cancel the proceeding. On the same day, they took the even bolder step of trying to having Judge Boasberg removed from the case.

But the invocation of the state secrets privilege in this context was a new level of aggression….

More…

Note…

I’m no Lawyer….

But it SURE sounds like a cover-up on defying a judges order that cause someone stretching the law to please a President who has NOT delivered on a promise to find ‘Masses of Illegal migrants ‘to deport …

This IS Trump’s technique….

We KNOW we did wrong….

Challenge the Law to bend it for us to get over….