Rhetoric from President Donald Trump’s top aides and allies toward unfriendly judges has reached a peak, but the Department of Justice has so far maintained deference toward the courts in its filings and hearings.
The DOJ issued its most aggressive legal pushback yet on Wednesday when it argued in a motion that Judge James Boasberg’s orders were “grave encroachments” on Trump’s authority and asked for another day to weigh how to respond to them. But even in the most heated cases, the DOJ has steered clear of threatening the kind of defiance that MAGA figures have increasingly demanded.
The case Boasberg is presiding over, involving Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport alleged Venezuelan gang members, has drawn the most ire from the Right. Stephen Miller, an immigration hawk and Trump’s deputy chief of staff, went on a media tear after Boasberg, an Obama appointee, temporarily paused the deportations.
“This judge violated the law. He violated the Constitution. He defied the system of government that we have in this country,” Miller said in a viral television interview.
Miller took to X to call adverse decisions by judges across the country “pure lawlessness” and the “gravest assault on democracy,” adding, “It must and will end.”
Tom Homan, Trump’s brash border czar, was confronted in a television interview about what would come next following Boasberg temporarily blocking the deportations that were carried out under the Alien Enemies Act.
“Another flight. … We’re not stopping,” Homan said. “I don’t care what judges think. I don’t care what the Left thinks. We’re coming.”
The DOJ did not convey that bluster in court papers.
“The Government respects this Court and has complied with its request to present the Government’s position on the legality of the Court’s [temporary restraining order] and the Government’s compliance with that TRO,” DOJ attorneys, including Attorney General Pam Bondi, wrote to Boasberg.
Meanwhile, Trump’s most vocal supporters, such as Article III Project founder Mike Davis, have called for defying court orders.
“It’s time to ignore these lawless orders,” Davis recently said. “It’s time to impeach these lawless judges.”
Trump himself said this week that Boasberg “should be IMPEACHED!!!” Impeaching a federal judge has occurred on rare occasions in history, mainly in cases of bribery and corruption. Conviction requires two-thirds of support in the Senate, meaning Democrats would have to agree to it. Trump’s call earned an extraordinary rebuke from Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, who said the appropriate course of action with unfavorable rulings is to appeal them, not impeach the judges who issued them.
Trump has been hit with dozens of lawsuits, often backed by Democratic groups, for his far-reaching executive actions. The judges have served as a check on the president’s power as Trump tests the limits of his authority, including by freezing billions of dollars in congressionally approved government spending, firing swaths of government workers and wiping out agencies, and using a novel entity informally led by billionaire tech CEO Elon Musk to sift through data across the executive branch.
Outside of court, Bondi is among the Trump officials who have been openly hostile toward district court judges issuing temporary injunctions in the lawsuits, describing them as “unelected” and “activists.” After Boasberg issued his 14-day hold on using the Alien Enemies Act to allow time for parties to brief him on the 18th-century law that has only ever been used in wartime, Bondi said that Boasberg “supported Tren de Aragua terrorists.” Inside the courtroom, where decorum is required at the risk of sanctions, her prosecutors do not display that demeanor and have assured the judges they will abide by their orders.
Former federal prosecutor Shan Wu said it is normal for top executive branch officials to express disagreement with rulings while still couching that they “respect the judge’s decision.”
“The people in the government, the agency heads or an attorney general or White House counsel, traditionally, they are very, very careful about criticizing judges,” Wu told the Washington Examiner. “They’re not going to go out and start calling for impeachment of judges.”
Wu noted that members of Congress have frequently been more critical of judges. Indeed, some in the right flank of the House recently introduced impeachment articles against them. Democratic lawmakers have done the same to conservative Supreme Court justices.
“But for the administration itself to go out and make statements like that, I don’t think I’ve really ever seen that,” said Wu, who served under former Attorney General Janet Reno. “It absolutely is not commonplace.”
Although far less vocal and persistent than Trump, President Joe Biden also once deviated from the norm by taking a defiant demeanor toward the Supreme Court after it struck down his $400 billion student loan cancellation plan. Biden boasted last year that he found a roundabout way to write off some student loan debt after the order, though the move has since been reversed again in court.
“The Supreme Court blocked it, but that didn’t stop me,” Biden said at the time.
Amid the growing tension with Boasberg in the Aliens Enemies Act case, Trump was pressed this week by Fox News host Laura Ingraham on whether he would flout a court order.
“No, you can’t do that,” Trump replied. “However, we have bad judges. We have very bad judges. These are judges that shouldn’t be allowed. I think at a certain point, you have to look at what do you do when you have a rogue judge.”
Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), a longtime member of the House Judiciary Committee, recently spoke out against the judges on Trump’s cases, calling them the “resistance” in “robes.” Issa spearheaded the “No Rogue Rulings Act,” which advanced out of the committee this month.
A spokesman for Issa told the Washington Examiner the Trump administration’s rhetoric was simply matching what it was receiving from judges, who have, at times, issued sweeping memoranda justifying bringing Trump’s executive actions to temporary halts.
“Everybody is missing that these rogue judges are in the administration’s face, and they are giving as good as they’re getting, rhetorically,” spokesman Jonathan Wilcox said.
Amid the lower court judges handing small victories to plaintiffs, who are often represented by Democratic-aligned entities, Wilcox pointed to the few prominent examples of cases that have made their way to higher courts and shifted in Trump’s favor.
Judge Amir Ali, a Biden appointee, ruled on Feb. 25, for example, that the U.S. Agency for International Development, which Trump has aimed to dismantle and fold into the State Department, must pay within 36 hours an estimated $2 billion it owed to contractors in outstanding invoices through mid-February. The order came after the Trump administration struggled for about two weeks to comply with Ali’s initial order on paying the bills. The Supreme Court denied an emergency appeal from the Trump administration, but the high court directed Ali to cooperate with USAID to create a more feasible payment timeline.
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The Washington, D.C., circuit court reversed Judge Amy Berman Jackson’s decision to temporarily reinstate Hampton Dellinger, who headed the Office of Special Counsel before Trump abruptly fired him without explanation.
“Because the government has shown a strong likelihood of success on the merits and its asserted injury outweighs Dellinger’s, we grant its motion,” the three-judge panel wrote, noting that the case was “about the presidential removal power.”