It has become clear that the Trump gang’s plan is to summarily detain and deport people before they have had a chance to challenge their detention in the courts via a habeas corpus petition. Once the people have been deported, they then claim that there is nothing they can do to bring them back, even if the plane carrying them was still in the air. This practice so enraged a district court judge James Boasberg that he began criminal contempt proceedings against the government because of their earlier defiance of his order to turn around planes that had been transporting people to El Salvador prions and then stonewalling his attempts to get them to give him a clear timeline of their actions.

A federal judge found probable cause Wednesday to hold the Trump administration in criminal contempt for willfully disobeying his order to immediately halt deportations under the rarely used Alien Enemies Act and turn around any airborne planes.

U.S. District Judge James Boasberg’s order gives the administration a final opportunity to come into compliance but says he otherwise will take steps to identify the specific people who flouted his March 15 ruling, which was later lifted by the Supreme Court, and refer them for prosecution.
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In dispute is whether the government violated an oral order from Boasberg given around 6:45 p.m. that day to halt or turn around any flights carrying migrants. 

The White House has sought to sidestep that question, saying it complied with a 7:27 p.m. written order. In court, however, they have declined to provide Boasberg with flight details and have asserted the ability to do so under the state secrets privilege.

Boasberg on Thursday raised the specter that the administration’s delay in publicizing the proclamation could have been “trying to put measures in place to get people subject to the proclamation removed from the country before it’s possible to challenge” their deportation and before it could be blocked by a court.

Boasberg seems to be fully aware of the Trump strategy of acting fast to avoid legal oversight.

In a surprise move, late on Friday night (or perhaps early on Saturday morning, it is not clear), the US Supreme Court (in a 7-2 ruling with Alito and Thomas dissenting) ordered the Trump administration to not deport a group of Venezuelan men that it had in its custody until the courts had had time to review their cases.

Before the late-night supreme court ruling, lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) argued in an emergency Friday court filing that dozens of Venezuelan men held in Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Bluebonnet detention center in Texas had been given notices indicating they were classified as members of the Tren de Aragua gang. They said the men would be deported under the Alien Enemies Act (AEA) and were told “that the removals are imminent and will happen tonight or tomorrow”.

The ACLU said immigration authorities were accusing other Venezuelan men held there of being members of the Tren de Aragua gang, which would make them subject to deportation. The ACLU said a number of the men in Texas had already been loaded onto a bus, and it urged the court to rule before they could be deported.
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Hours before the supreme court ruling was announced, an appeals court in Washington DC temporarily halted Boasberg’s contempt proceedings against the Trump administration over its deportation flights to El Salvador last month.

It looks like even the Supreme Court (at least a majority) has figured out what has been obvious to most observers, that Trump wants to avoid any court oversight.

Alito issued his dissenting opinion a day later arguing that there was no reason for the rushed decision blocking Trump since there was no sign that they would be imminently deported, a highly disingenuous statement given the practices of the administration to act secretly and quickly.

Alito further wrote that both “the Executive and the Judiciary have an obligation to follow the law”, but it was not clear whether the supreme court had jurisdiction until legal avenues had been pursued through lower courts. He also objected to the fact that and the justices had not had the chance to hear the government’s side.

“The only papers before this Court were those submitted by the applicants,” Alito wrote. “The Court had not ordered or received a response by the Government regarding either the applicants’ factual allegations or any of the legal issues presented by the application. And the Court did not have the benefit of a Government response filed in any of the lower courts either,” Alito said.

In his dissent, Alito said the applicants had not shown they were in “imminent danger of removal”.

You can read Alito’s dissent here. It shows a great effort to bend over to appease Trump. In it he says that it was not correct that the only side that the Supreme Court had heard from was from those submitting the application to stop the deportation and not the government side. He concludes:

In sum, literally in the middle of the night, the Court issued unprecedented and legally questionable relief without giving the lower courts a chance to rule, without hearing from the opposing party, within eight hours of receiving the application, with dubious factual support for its order, and without providing any explanation for its order.

Well, duh. If the Supreme Court had first asked for a response from the government, it likely feared that they would have stalled until the people had been deported and then the court would have faced the much more difficult situation that they face with Kilmar Ábrego García, of trying to get back someone who had already been sent away.

Senator Amy Klobuchar seems to think that the administration’s thumbing its nose at the courts has gone far enough and that it is time for more drastic action.

Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar warned on Sunday that the US is “getting closer and closer to a constitutional crisis”, but the courts, growing Republican disquiet at Trump administration policies, and public protest were holding it off.

“I believe as long as these courts hold, and the constituents hold, and the congress starts standing up, our democracy will hold,” Klobuchar told CNN’s State of the Union, adding “but Donald Trump is trying to pull us down into the sewer of a crisis.”

Klobuchar said the US supreme court should hold Trump administration officials in contempt if they continue to ignore a court order to facilitate the return of Kilmar Ábrego García from El Salvador, the Maryland resident the government admitted in court it had deported by mistake.

Klobuchar said the court could appoint a special prosecutor, independent of Trump’s Department of Justice, to uphold the rule of law and charge any officials who are responsible for Ábrego García’s deportation, or have refused to facilitate his return.

I cannot see a majority of the Supreme Court Court agreeing to do this but am glad that the possibility is being raised.