US District Judge James Boasberg’s effort to investigate potential criminal contempt by Kristi Noem and other senior Trump administration officials in connection with deportation flights last year has been blocked for the second time by a bitterly divided appeals court panel.
In 2-1 decision On Tuesday, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals concluded that Boasberg, the chief federal district court judge in Washington, had overstepped his authority by pursuing potential contempt charges against administration officials who had signed the deal despite the judge’s effort to block deportations to El Salvador.
“The district court proposes to scrutinize high-level executive branch deliberations regarding matters of national security and diplomacy,” Trump-appointed Judge Neomi Rao wrote for the majority, which also included Trump appointee Justin Walker. “These actions are a clear abuse of discretion.”
Judge Michelle Childs, a Biden appointee, responded in an 80-page dissent that the panel’s decision could undermine the authority of federal courts for generations.
The decision is a victory for the administration against a judge whom President Donald Trump has tried to portray as a rival, with the president even calling for his impeachment over an unfavorable ruling — drawing outrage from Chief Justice John Roberts.
The controversy stems from an effort by the Department of Homeland Security in March 2025 to hastily deport more than 100 Venezuelan citizens the administration believed to be members of the transnational gang Tren de Aragua, relying on Trump’s unprecedented invocation of the Alien Enemy Act to justify removing them without due process. They were immediately captured and put on planes to El Salvador, whose president agreed to hold them indefinitely in a notorious anti-terrorism prison.
Several of those targeted by Trump’s order filed an emergency lawsuit in Washington, DC, denying that they were members of the Tren de Aragua and asking the court to immediately stop efforts to deport them without due process. Boasberg, in an extraordinary and urgent weekend maneuver, ordered a halt to deportations and said officials should place those already in U.S. custody in the air.
But the Trump administration rebuked Boasberg and deported the Venezuelans into El Salvador custody in a cinematically filmed tarmac transfer that Trump and his allies described as part of the president’s mass deportation agenda. Administration officials said Boasberg’s order could not apply to those killed while they were outside U.S. airspace and pointed to ambiguity in the judge’s verbal instructions, which included some differences from his subsequent written order.
The case reached the Supreme Court, which supported the Trump administration’s argument that the original lawsuit should have been brought in Texas rather than Washington, D.C., where the Venezuelans were detained at the time they filed it.
Boasberg, an Obama appointee, continued to pursue the case, concerned that the administration had disregarded his order to retain custody of the individuals. The same appeals court panel halted his initial contempt investigation in a split ruling last year, but the case was eventually returned to Boasberg’s court for further proceedings.
Boasberg reopened her contempt investigation after telling Trump administration officials that former DHS Secretary Noem had issued a final directive to transfer people to Salvadoran custody despite Boasberg’s attempt to stop it.
Rao said Boasberg should have stopped there.
“These actions inappropriately jeopardize open, independent scrutiny of executive branch decision-making on national security matters that impact ongoing military and diplomatic initiatives,” Rao wrote.
ACLU attorneys, who argued on behalf of the deported Venezuelans, said they would ask the full bench of the D.C. Circuit to take up the issue.
“Our system is built on deference to court orders by the executive branch, including the president,” said ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt. “There is now no question that the Trump administration knowingly violated the court’s order.”
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanch lauded the decision, saying it should “finally end Judge Boasberg’s year-long campaign against hard-working department lawyers doing their job to fight illegal immigration.”
Rao and Walker also accepted the Justice Department’s claim that Boasberg’s directives were never actually violated because his written order applied only to immigrants who had not yet been deported from the US and planes carrying deportees had left US airspace by the time the written order appeared.
Walker agreed and underlined this point, noting that Boasberg’s written order only prevented the administration from “removing” people under Trump’s proclamation and said nothing about those who were already en route. And he noted that Boasberg issued the written order precisely so that lawyers in the expedited proceedings would not be required to write up their oral comments.
Walker also took a dig at media coverage of the case, saying that journalists mistakenly portrayed Boasberg’s decision as an order to turn on deportation planes rather than as one of several options. Walker called it a “predictably inaccurate comment that harms our already perfect media age.”
But Walker also praised Boasberg, who he described as having a “widely respected record of impartial decision-making.”
“I do not envy the position of any judge who is faced with so much time pressure to make difficult and high-stakes legal decisions,” Walker wrote.
In his dissent, Childs emphasized that the Trump administration was seeking unusual relief from the appeals court to halt further proceedings, rather than following the normal course of allowing them to be completed and then filing an appeal.
“The majority has circumvented the district court’s inherent and statutory powers and done so in a way that will impact not only these contempt proceedings,” he said, “but will reverberate in future proceedings against all plaintiffs.”
