US President Donald Trump’s administration could be held in criminal contempt of court for disobeying an order to stop the deportations of alleged Venezuelan gang members who could not challenge their deportation, federal judge James Boasberg said on Wednesday.
Boasberg has given the US government one week to remedy its dismissal of his order by providing the deported men with the right to due process in court. The Trump administration has appealed the ruling. The judge’s Wednesday ruling is the latest addition to the growing pile of legal challenges that Trump’s executive orders and actions are facing.
So, what does it mean to be held in contempt of court? What’s next? And what happens if a president simply refuses to follow a court’s orders?
What happened?
Late on March 15, Boasberg had issued a temporary restraining order preventing the Trump administration from exercising the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to carry out deportations. Boasberg is the chief judge of the District Court for the District of Columbia.
The Alien Enemies Act gives the US president the discretion to detain or deport non-citizens during wartime. The president can carry out these deportations based solely on citizenship status, without a hearing.
While issuing the restraining order, Boasberg had also ordered that deportation flights en route to El Salvador turn around and return.
Hours after this restraining order was issued, on the morning of March 16, El Salvador President Nayib Bukele claimed in an X post that his country had received 238 members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua and 23 members of the Salvadoran gang MS-13 from the US. Bukele also reposted a news snippet about Boasberg’s ruling, captioning it: “Oopsie … Too late” with a crying-with-laughter emoji.
Oopsie…
Too late 😂 pic.twitter.com/nDHL6deLJq
— Nayib Bukele (@nayibbukele) March 16, 2025
The alleged gang members are being held in a maximum-security prison in El Salvador, the Centre for the Confinement of Terrorism (Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo) or CECOT.
In a post on March 18 on his Truth Social platform, Trump called Boasberg a “Radical Left Lunatic” and called for his impeachment. Trump’s impeachment call was shot down by Chief Justice John Roberts, who said that “impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision.”
Boasberg had also demanded that the government reveal the flight timings of the plane that carried those deportees, to establish whether it indeed could have turned around and returned to the US following his order.
But on March 24, the US Department of Justice revealed that the Trump administration was invoking the “state secrets privilege” to avoid providing these details. The doctrine is supposed to be invoked when military or national security interests are at risk.
On April 3, Boasberg weighed contempt during a hearing where he pressed the Justice Department to find out whether the Trump administration had flouted the restraining order. The Justice Department denied this, saying the flights had already left the US by the time the restraining order was filed.
The US Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to deport immigrants on April 7, but held that they must get a court hearing before they are deported.
What did Judge Boasberg say?
In a 46-page ruling on Wednesday, Boasberg wrote that the Trump administration’s actions were “sufficient for the court to conclude that probable cause exists to find the government in criminal contempt”.
He wrote that the deportees were rushed out to El Salvador by the US government, before they could challenge their deportations in court, despite his temporary restraining order.
“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,” wrote Boasberg.
Boasberg also noted that Secretary of State Marco Rubio reposted Bukele’s post in which he had reposted the news snippet. “Boasts by Defendants intimated that they had defied the Court’s Order deliberately and gleefully,” wrote Boasberg.
What does it mean to be held in contempt of court?
Contempt of court refers to the willful disobedience of the court of law or its officers.
Contempt of court can be civil contempt, which happens when someone fails to abide by a court order or disrupts court proceedings; or criminal contempt, when someone deliberately or willfully disrespects a court’s orders.
In most cases, courts censure, but don’t punish, those it holds guilty of civil contempt if they eventually comply with its orders.
Criminal contempt of court, on the other hand, carries a punishment spelled out in the statute books – a fine of up to $1,000, a prison sentence of up to six months, or both.
“Flouting a court order would be an impeachable offence for failing to faithfully execute the laws as required by Article 2 of the Constitution,” Bruce Fein, an American lawyer specialising in constitutional and international law, told Al Jazeera. Article 2 of the US Constitution details the power and responsibilities held by the US president. One such responsibility is that the president “shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed”.
What comes next for the White House?
Boasberg has said that White House officials can avoid being held in criminal contempt by reversing their disregard for his restraining order. They can do this by allowing the deported men to challenge their deportations in court. He gave the White House an April 23 deadline.
The White House could alternatively identify the officials who decided not to turn the planes around, disregarding his order, so that they can be prosecuted.
In this case, the Justice Department has appealed the ruling before the DC Circuit Court of Appeals.
In all, the Trump administration faces more than 190 legal challenges to its policies, according to Just Security, a non-partisan digital law and policy journal.
The US government recently acknowledged that it had deported Salvadoran citizen Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, 29, to CECOT as an “administrative error.” On April 10, the US Supreme Court ruled in a 9-0 decision that Trump should facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return to the US. On Tuesday, US District Judge Paula Xinis in Maryland said she would probe whether the Trump administration violated an order to secure Abrego Garcia’s return. However, Xinis said she does not yet plan to hold the government in contempt.
What happens if the White House refuses to obey a court’s orders?
A court can, as Boasberg has threatened to do, hold specific officials in contempt.
However, the president can pardon officials convicted of criminal contempt. During his first term in 2017, Trump pardoned Joe Arpaio, a former county sheriff, who was found guilty of criminal contempt after he defied a court order asking him to stop racially profiling Latinos. Usually, as the White House has done in this case, the government appeals a court’s ruling.
That process of appeals can go all the way up to the Supreme Court.
But ultimately, the task of enforcing a contempt order falls on the US Marshals Service, which comes under the Department of Justice, a part of the Trump administration. While law enforcement officials are expected to follow court rulings, that has not always been the case.
Fein told Al Jazeera that the court could also hold Trump himself in contempt.
Congress could also impeach him for violating a court order. But to remove him from office, the motion would need a majority vote in the House and a two-thirds majority in the Senate. The House currently has 218 Republican members and 213 Democrats, while the Senate has 53 Republicans, 45 Democrats and two independents.
A Congress “currently controlled by Republicans, will not act unless the American people demand the same through phone calls, emails, and demonstrations,” Fein said.
“The bottom line: whether we remain a government of laws in lieu of a government of men is now up to Congress and ultimately, the American people.”
Has the Trump administration violated court orders before?
Yes, it has – during Trump’s first term.
Soon after taking office in 2017, Trump signed an executive order banning nationals from multiple Muslim-majority countries from entering the US. Multiple federal judges issued orders suspending the ban, deeming it unconstitutional. However, Democrats and lawyers at airports complained that Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents were going against these suspensions and detaining refugees and travellers from the Muslim countries.
In June 2018, the US Supreme Court eventually upheld the travel ban in a 5-4 ruling, reversing the multiple lower court rulings that had suspended it.
But while Trump’s clashes with judges are well known, he isn’t the first president to find himself at odds with the courts.
Some have come close to defying even Supreme Court orders.
Have US presidents ignored Supreme Court rulings before?
Kind of. The most notable example of this is former President Abraham Lincoln defying former Chief Justice Roger Taney. At the beginning of the US Civil War in 1861, Lincoln suspended a writ of habeas corpus to imprison people suspected of being Confederate sympathisers. Habeas corpus is a centuries-old common law principle that allows a detainee to challenge their detention in court. Chief Justice Taney held that Congress had the power to suspend the writ, not the US president. Lincoln largely ignored Taney’s opinion. However, Taney was “riding circuit” at the time and his opinion was filed with the Circuit Court for the District of Maryland, not the US Supreme Court, and historians continue to argue about the authority through which Taney issued his ruling.
At the beginning of World War II in 1942, Democrat President Franklin D Roosevelt invoked a proclamation authorising the trial of eight German saboteurs at a military tribunal. While Roosevelt suggested he would go ahead with this whether or not the Supreme Court thought he was right, the top court eventually backed the president’s policy.
There have also been instances in which US presidents have nearly defied the Supreme Court. In 1974, in the wake of the Watergate Scandal, former President Richard Nixon claimed that the concept of executive privilege allowed him to withhold sensitive information, such as communication between officials and tape recordings, from investigators. The Supreme Court unanimously disagreed with Nixon, who ended up complying with the court shortly after the ruling. Two weeks after the ruling, Nixon resigned.
George W Bush, Republican president from 2001 to 2009, clashed with the Supreme Court when his post-9/11 strategy for national security clashed with a Supreme Court ruling on the treatment of prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay. But Bush also eventually deferred to the Supreme Court.
Presidents have also been called on to enforce Supreme Court contempt orders. In 1957, President Dwight Eisenhower sent a thousand army troops to Arkansas to enforce the Supreme Court ruling on desegregating schools after the state governor backed the segregationists.
However, presidents have not always deferred to the top court.
In 1832, President Andrew Jackson allowed Georgia’s governor to ignore a Supreme Court order protecting the Cherokee community’s right to remain on their native land. However, the court had not ordered the federal government to take any action, so Jackson never officially refused to enforce the decision.
