Trump Officials Get Even More Power to Send Immigrants to Guantánamo (2025)

A judge said Wednesday there is probable cause to hold Donald Trump’s administration in criminal contempt for refusing to turn around the El Salvador–bound planes carrying more than 200 Venezuelan immigrants last month.

In a 46-page ruling, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg wrote that the government’s actions “demonstrate a willful disregard” of his previous order that barred Trump from deporting the Venezuelan immigrants—the majority of whom have no criminal record—to El Salvador, where they are currently being held in CECOT, a prison notorious for human rights abuses.

Trump deported the immigrants under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, an archaic law that has only been invoked three times before, most famously for the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

The White House’s blatant disregard of Boasberg’s order is “sufficient to conclude” that there is probable cause for criminal contempt, the judge wrote, adding that none of the government’s explanations have been satisfactory.

Following Boasberg’s first ruling, Trump asked the Supreme Court to impeach the Obama-appointed judge, which Chief Justice Roberts refused, in a rare but telling public statement.

“For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose,” Roberts said on March 18.

The Supreme Court did however overturn Boasberg’s order at Trump’s request on April 7, giving the president the go-ahead to continue deporting innocent immigrants under the wartime powers act. Last week, the U.S. deported 10 more people it claimed were gang members to El Salvador, according to Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The Trump administration contended to Boasberg that the Supreme Court’s ruling should protect it from criminal contempt, but the judge clearly is fed up with the White House’s relentless excuses.

“The Constitution does not tolerate willful disobedience of judicial orders—especially by officials of a coordinate branch who have sworn an oath to uphold it,” Boasberg’s ruling reads.

Does MAGA have any idea what due process is? Do they care?

Donald Trump’s acolytes continue to insist against providing due process to undocumented immigrants the government claims are gang members.

In March, more than 200 alleged gang members, whose deportations to prison in El Salvador were expedited under the Alien Enemies Act, were denied the right to challenge their designation and removal under the AEA. In many cases, lawyers for the detainees were not even notified that their clients were being deported.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, an anti-immigrant legal activist, has set off on a campaign against “due process” for undocumented immigrants, or whatever he thinks due process is, in support of Trump’s mass deportation plot.

During an appearance on Fox News Tuesday night, while discussing Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador, Miller claimed that “under the due process that these Democrats so venerate for illegal invaders, it is legally impermissible for him to have one more minute in this country.”

But that’s not how due process works. It was a judge who originally stated that Abrego Garcia could not be removed to El Salvador, and the government’s mistake caused him to be deported.

Members of the Trump administration have claimed that Abrego Garcia is a “convicted” member of MS-13 who was “engaged in human trafficking,” without providing any evidence. Due process would present an opportunity for the government to present any legal justification for an individual’s removal, but because it apparently has none, the process must be elided.

Jack Posobiec, a MAGA activist, also had a loose understanding of what due process is.

“Did Rachel Morin get due process? Did Laken Riley get due process?” he wrote in a post on X Tuesday, referring to two women who were killed by undocumented immigrants. “No one ever asks that.”

Most people never ask about that because the question doesn’t make any sense.

Due process is a legal protection for all people against the U.S. government set out in the Fifth Amendment, and then applied to states in the Fourteenth Amendment.

“No person … shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,” the Fifth Amendment stated. Conservative Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in a 1993 Supreme Court ruling that “it is well established that the Fifth Amendment entitles aliens to due process of law in deportation proceedings.”

Posobiec’s baseless comment echoes one from border czar Tom Homan, who said last month, “Due process? What was Laken Riley’s due process? Where were all these young women that were killed and raped by members of TdA, where was their due process?”

Earlier this month, the Supreme Court ruled that while the Trump administration could continue deportations under the AEA, it needed to provide detainees with the opportunity to file habeas corpus challenges, a complex and rarely successful legal procedure. The court also ruled that these needed to be filed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, a MAGA-aligned court in Texas where the deportation flights are staged.

If Kilmar Abrego Garcia successfully returns to the United States, the Department of Justice plans to detain him again and send him to a different country than El Salvador, or get rid of his withholding of removal and send him back to El Salvador.

That’s what the DOJ filed in federal court Tuesday, ahead of a hearing with Judge Paula Xinis where the Trump administration was supposed to provide information on steps it had taken to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return to the U.S. from El Salvador’s Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, a megaprison known for human rights abuses where he is currently detained.

The DOJ didn’t provide any new information on Abrego Garcia, although the filing did once again repeat the administration’s false assertion, echoed by El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, that the building trades worker is actually a member of the violent MS-13 gang and shows how insistent it is that Abrego Garcia can’t stay in the U.S.

This is despite the fact that the government previously admitted in court that Abrego Garcia was wrongly deported, violating a judge’s 2019 order preventing him from being sent back to El Salvador. In response to a Supreme Court order that Abrego Garcia must be returned, the government has attempted to argue semantics over the high court’s use of the word “facilitate,” claiming that it can’t go any further than taking action domestically.

In reality, the Trump administration is doing everything it can to ignore the Supreme Court because the president wants to set a precedent that deportations are final. If Abrego Garcia is successfully returned, it’ll give immigrants hope that they can find recourse in the law and lessen their fear, and that isn’t the climate the administration wants.

A top adviser for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was abruptly placed on administrative leave after he was connected to an information leak at the Department of Defense, Reuters reported Tuesday.

Dan Caldwell was escorted from the Pentagon Tuesday and is being investigated for an “unauthorized disclosure” of classified DOD information, an anonymous U.S. official told Reuters.

It’s unclear what leaked intelligence Caldwell is being investigated for, but he was wrapped up in last month’s Signalgate scandal, in which members of Donald Trump’s Cabinet discussed U.S. military plans to bomb the Houthis in Yemen in a Signal group chat that also happened to include The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg. Along with Caldwell, 18 Trump officials were presumed to be part of the chat, including Hegseth, Vice President JD Vance, and national security adviser Mike Walz.

The following week, the DOD released a memo requesting an investigation into the “recent unauthorized disclosures of national security information.”

“This investigation will commence immediately and culminate in a report to the Secretary of Defense,” the memo, written by Hegseth’s chief of staff, Joe Kasper, reads. “I expect to be informed immediately if this effort results in information identifying a party responsible for an unauthorized disclosure, and that such information will be referred to the appropriate criminal law enforcement entity for criminal prosecution.”