The White House doubles down on its attacks on the independence of judges

The White House on Wednesday doubled down on its attacks on the independence of federal judges in a confrontation with dangerous consequences. In a bid to delegitimize the authority of courts with which they disagree, U.S. President Donald Trump, his press secretary Karoline Leavitt, and tech oligarch Elon Musk have repeatedly lashed out at judges who have ruled against the wishes of the administration. This tendency has multiplied after U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg on Saturday barred the deportation of more than 200 Venezuelans under an 18th-century wartime law. The immigrants were nevertheless transferred to El Salvador.

“If a President doesn’t have the right to throw murderers, and other criminals, out of our Country because a Radical Left Lunatic Judge wants to assume the role of President, then our Country is in very big trouble, and destined to fail!,” Trump wrote Wednesday on his social media platform, Truth, about Judge Boasberg.

It was the second attack against the judge in less than 24 hours. The first, calling for the judge’s impeachment, forced Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, a man who normally avoids public pronouncements, to intervene. The head of the judiciary issued a statement in which, without naming names, he issued a reminder that the proper course of action when disagreeing with a court’s decision is to appeal to a higher court, not to launch impeachment proceedings.

Roberts’ intervention doesn’t appear to have had much effect. The White House is convinced that presidential power has very few limits, and that it shouldn’t be a mere federal judge who imposes them. “You can’t have a democracy where individual district judges can assume the full powers of the commander in chief,” Trump’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, declared on Wednesday.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt spoke in equally damning terms, accusing the judges of “clearly acting as partisan activists” and trying to paralyze the administration’s program. “Not only are they usurping the will of the president and the chief executive of our country, but they are undermining the will of the American public,” she maintained at a press conference. The press secretary went further, calling on the Supreme Court to “restrain these activist judges.”

Meanwhile the Justice Department, for the third day in a row, resisted Boasberg’s orders to provide data on the flights that carried more than 200 Venezuelans whom the Trump administration accuses of being violent criminals and members of the Tren de Aragua criminal gang. According to government lawyers, the court must end its “continuous intrusions” into the executive branch’s authority.

Boasberg has already asked the government three times to provide him with data on the flights that transported these immigrants, first to Honduras and then to El Salvador, to determine whether it acted in contempt of court.

In an urgent hearing, the judge had ordered Saturday that these detainees, whom the government wanted to expel without due process by applying the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, remain on U.S. soil. The judge demanded that if the flights had already taken off, they should turn around. But the planes did not return. The Justice Department maintains that they were already over international waters and the judge no longer had jurisdiction over them, so there was no contempt. Department lawyers have consistently refused to provide Boasberg with the information he requested. This Wednesday, they requested a further extension, and the judge granted an additional 24 hours.

Boasberg maintains that he is not hunting down the administration, as the lawyers accuse him of, but simply wants to establish the facts, to determine “whether the government deliberately disobeyed” his order to turn the planes around “and, if so, what the consequences should be.”

The case of the Venezuelan deportees is not the only one in which the U.S. government has suffered serious setbacks. Several courts have halted measures ranging from canceling birthright citizenship to the dismissal of tens of thousands of federal employees. Just this Tuesday, a Maryland court ordered the agency headed by Musk, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), to stop dismantling the federal development aid agency (USAID). A judge in Washington also overturned the Pentagon’s ban on transgender people enlisting in the U.S. armed forces.

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