The Trump administration pushed forward into a new phase of the rolling national constitutional crisis over the weekend, reportedly defying two different federal court orders imposing limits on its deportation of immigrants without due process. First, immigrant authorities deported Rasha Alawieh, a kidney transplant specialist at Brown University, despite a judge’s Friday order halting her removal. Second, authorities deported about 250 Venezuelan migrants, flouting another judge’s explicit directive to turn around American planes that hadn’t yet landed in El Salvador, where the migrants were being sent. The Justice Department claimed that it could not comply with the order barring Alawieh’s removal because it arrived too late. But the White House defended its defiance of the order prohibiting deportations of Venezuelans, insisting that the judge had no jurisdiction over the migrants—and that Trump holds absolute, unreviewable constitutional authority to expel noncitizens.
[...]
His order was not complied with. Instead, as the ACLU has shown, migrant flights that were already “in the air” did not return to the U.S. According to Axios, administration officials debated whether to turn the planes around. They decided not to, “on advice of counsel,” who reportedly said “the order is not applicable” because “they were already outside U.S. airspace.” (That is not a remotely plausible reading of Boasberg’s order.) El Salvador’s president then tweeted a story about the court order with the comment “Oopsie … Too late,” which Secretary of State Marco Rubio retweeted. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt later contended that the administration did not “refuse to comply,” but rather that the order “had no lawful basis” and was issued after the migrants “had already been removed from U.S. territory.” Again, as the ACLU has pointed out, Boasberg’s order expressly applied to migrants already en route to El Salvador. So the White House did, quite clearly, defy the order, on the grounds that it could unilaterally conclude its requirements were not “lawful.”
If that is sufficient reason to disobey a court ruling, then all judicial rulings are merely advisory, or just suggestions, and the three coequal branches of government have been replaced by an elected monarch. [...] DOJ lawyers have argued that Trump does not even need the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to order these deportations: Rather, he has an “inherent Article II authority to protect the nation” by determining that an immigrant “represents a significant risk to the United States” and “should be summarily removed from this country.”
[...]
Meanwhile, Trump himself has made it clear that this extreme and dangerous new vision of executive power does not apply to the presidency, but only his presidency: It is not a set of neutral principles, but an ever-evolving pretext for his own personal whims and cruelties, dressed up in legalese concocted by the conservative legal movement for precisely this purpose.
Slate
Here we go...
Tyrant Baby has spoken: I'm the important one! I won everything. That lunatic judge didn't win anything!
From Trumpland, no doubt: Sit down, JR. We'll call on you when we need you to approve the king's moves.
That, too.
Pathetic. They take their marching orders from Trump's bleats on his social media platform.
Just keep filing orders, I guess, and he'll keep ignoring them.
And in another case...
UPDATE 07:32 pm:
UPDATE 03/19/2025:
UPDATE 12:09 pm:
UPDATE 02:47 pm:
UPDATE 03/21/2025:
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