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While removing an illegal who has not been convicted of any crime on a vague suspicion that he might be a gang member, with the full knowledge that he will face a life in prison on your dime under atrocious circumstances is utterly despicable, that is not the full extend of their misconduct.
In his case specifically, they violated a court order to do that. "Accidentally".
This scales much beyond this case. "Oh, we are sorry your honor, we honestly thought that you had authorized that no-knock raid against that (suspected) Tesla-burning terrorist. Anyhow, now he is dead, so there is nothing we can do about that misunderstanding. All's well that ends well, I guess."
Of course, we don't have to worry if Trump would also deport US citizens to the mega prisons, because he has just announced that he would.
Obviously the court doesn’t have jurisdiction to bring people back from the dead. Perhaps that case is instructive. Maybe the proper remedy is to find the officer who screwed-up and charge him with kidnapping?
It has the jurisdiction to punish people for committing murder.
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Thing is, this is already standard practice. And has been for many years. Second Amendment people have plenty of atrocity stories over ATF raiding the wrong house.
The resemblance is superficial. In this case, one or more people intentionally ignored a court order and can be held liable for that even if some of those involved in the deportation cannot. The planes were forbidden from taking the detained to El Salvador. If there is an example where the ATF is specifically instructed by a court order not to raid someone's house, and they do it anyway, and the recipient of that order is not held in contempt of court, in that case the comparison holds water. Not otherwise.
ATF is only authorized to raid houses that it gets a warrant to raid. ALL the other houses are off limits (subject to a few other exceptions). If they have a warrant that says they can raid 101 Elm Street, and they raid 103 Elm Street by mistake, they have done the same thing as was done here.
Note that in neither case did anyone intentionally ignore a court order, or at least evidence of intentionality has not been presented.
The matter here is that one or more people in the Department of Justice have violated 18 U.S.C. § 401(3) by ignoring a lawful court order, and criminal contempt proceedings are ongoing to determine exactly who in the department is to be held responsible.
The defendants had a responsibility to carry out the court order. There is indeed evidence of intentional disobedience, as I welcome anyone interested in the facts of the matter at hand -- and not irrelevant, separate grievances -- to ascertain in the ruling[1] issued today.
[1]https://big.assets.huffingtonpost.com/athena/files/2025/04/16/67ffdc21e4b0cc0115773511.pdf
I see nothing there aside from the District Court throwing a temper tantrum about being overruled. They will be overruled again. The court's complaint is that the Trump administration did not obey its -- unlawful -- order in the time between it being issued and it being vacated. This will not stand on appeal, and the most likely effect of it is to narrow the doctrines upon which it is depending (which would be a good thing -- Walker v. City of Birmingham was a travesty).
The relevant order here is the earlier order for withholding to removal, and there is no evidence the violation of that order was deliberate.
You are wrong. If the Trump administration had not disobeyed the relevant TRO, then there would be no grounds for the contempt filing. The reason he is bringing contempt charges is that the defendants brazenly disobeyed a legal order. This has nothing to do with being overruled: Boasberg has the authority to issue TROs, which can be challenged and dismissed on appeal. Ignoring them is a criminal offense.
If we were to characterize some party as 'throwing a tantrum,' it would be the Trump admin who both 1. got their way on the decision in appeals and 2. called for Boasberg's impeachment, prompting the Chief Justice to make the statement:
No, the real matter here is that someone, likely multiple people, violated 18 U.S.C. § 401.
Yes. That is illegal and the filing is replete with evidence suggesting that it was deliberate. Moreover, the defendants do not even dispute that they did this deliberately.
The long-established blackletter law settled by a case in which the most sympathetic of parties lost, if you knew the first thing about it, is hardly the false pretense suggested by the word 'travesty'. None of the exigencies and circumstances on which the minority's argument was based in that proceeding obtains in this one, in fact it is the opposite. The dissenting opinion grants that the petitioners would have no case at all if
Indeed, the exigencies that obtain in Walker v. City of Birmingham in favor of the petitioners work exactly against the Trump admin in the case at hand:
If the Trump admin respected the authority of the courts and was confident in the constitutionality of their intended deportations, there is no reason why they could not wait for the appeal to resolve in their favor. Had they done this they would be protected from Boasberg's 'tantrum' as you put it, and as a bonus they may have not carried out any improper removals 'by accident.'
Far from being the sole case establishing that Americans are not entitled to ignore court orders, Walker v. City of Birmingham affirms that adherence to court procedure is so fundamental (the lower federal courts having been established in 1789 with exactly the power "to punish by fine or imprisonment, at the discretion of said courts, all contempts of authority in any cause or hearing before the same") that it indeed prevails even in some cases where circumstances make the contemnor's actions urgent. Again, not what we have here. There is no way in which it could have been decided which would have set a precedent for the current US administration's actions in disregarding the judiciary.
The TRO was not a legal order, which is why it was vacated. The District Court insists that the administration was still required to follow its unlawful order, using a precedent that was created to provide a "gotcha" against civil rights protestors. I stand by my characterization of a "temper tantrum".
Your claim is that the contempt filing is underway because the TRO was found to be unconstitutional. This position is incoherent: Boasberg surely would still have filed these charges were the TRO found constitutional through the appellate process. The party that ignored legal procedure and is now calling for the impeachment of a judge is the one behaving petulantly, and the Chief Justice's statement supports this contention.
I have already anticipated and dismantled the shaky and non-pertinent argument that you now produce. You have ignored that work.
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That's already how things work, and how they have worked for years. Ever heard of qualified immunity? I means if the cops get the address wrong and shoot you to death they just have to say "Whoops, our bad, sorry about that. Total mistake on our part" and they're good to go. The Supreme Court recently declined to overturn a cop's qualified immunity for having done exactly that. (Well, not exactly that: they only flashbanged them and held the family at gunpoint, but if they'd gone ahead and shot them it would be much the same).
There is substantial overlap between criminal justice reformers who take issue with the US' policy of extreme leniency towards police misconduct and people who take issue with sending people to Salvadoran gulags. Conversely, there is a generalized skepticism towards due process common amongst both hardline deportation advocates and tough-on-crime/back-the-blue types.
That aside, that's not how things worked. If the police violate your rights, you can usually at least get a court order telling them to stop doing that (and potentially scuttling any case against you), even if they can't return the lost time/reputation/emotional well-being. You can often obtain damages as well.
Qualified immunity is not what people seem to think it is. QI protects government staff from personal liability in carrying out their duties (shifting the burden onto taxpayers), even when they egregiously fuck up; it doesn't indemnify them from criminal charges. The bigger issue there is simply that the criminal justice system bends over backwards to give law enforcement officers accused of misconduct the benefit of the doubt. If a cop murders you, it's still murder, but it's exceeding rare for cops to get charged and even rarer for them to get convicted.
(For example, the notorious Daniel Shaver case, the city ended up paying about $10m in damages to Shaver's relatives even though the officer was acquitted)
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