NPR - March 19, 2025:
President Trump on Tuesday called for the impeachment of the judge who ordered a temporary halt to the deportation of alleged Venezuelan gang members.
Without naming James Boasberg, the chief judge of the district court of Washington, D.C., Trump said,
"This judge, like many of the Crooked Judges' I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED!!!" [emph added] He also called Boasberg a "Radical Left Lunatic of a Judge, a troublemaker and agitator who was sadly appointed by Barack Hussein Obama."
Boasberg on Saturday halted Trump's deportation order for two weeks after the president, in a highly controversial move, used the 1798 Enemy Aliens Act, a law not used since World War II, to deport the alleged gang members.
The government appealed to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals on April 15, which may take the case from the hands of Judge Boasberg. [25-5067]
EXECUTIVE ORDER, March 15, 2025:
Invocation of the Alien Enemies Act Regarding the Invasion of The United States by Tren De Aragua
As President of the United States and Commander in Chief, it is my solemn duty to protect the American people from the devastating effects of this invasion. NOW, THEREFORE, I, DONALD J. TRUMP, President of the United States of America, by the authority vested in me by the
Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including the Alien Enemies Act, 50 U.S.C. 21 et seq., hereby proclaim and direct as follows:
Section 1. I find and declare that TdA is perpetrating, attempting, and threatening an invasion or predatory incursion against the territory of the United States. TdA is undertaking hostile actions and conducting irregular warfare against the territory of the United States both directly and at the direction, clandestine or otherwise, of the Maduro regime in Venezuela. I make these findings using the full extent of my authority to conduct the Nation’s foreign affairs under the Constitution.
Tren de Aragua (TdA) is a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization with thousands of members, many of whom have unlawfully infiltrated the United States and are conducting irregular warfare and undertaking hostile actions against the United States. TdA operates in conjunction with Cártel de los Soles, the Nicolas Maduro regime-sponsored, narco-terrorism enterprise based in Venezuela, and commits brutal crimes, including murders, kidnappings, extortions, and human, drug, and weapons trafficking. TdA has engaged in and continues to engage in mass illegal migration to the United States to further its objectives of harming United States citizens, undermining public safety, and supporting the Maduro regime’s goal of destabilizing democratic nations in the Americas, including the United States.
TdA is closely aligned with, and indeed has infiltrated, the Maduro regime, including its military and law enforcement apparatus.
Donald Trump on March 15 issued a Proclamation - relying on the Alien Enemies Act, 50 U.S.C. 21, et seq. Carrying it out three planeloads of allegedly invading aliens were seized and taken to El Salvador.
The Proclamation is notable for its hyperbole and implausible assertion of invasion by foreign terrorists affiliated with Tren de Aragua:
Based upon a review of TdA’s activities, and in consultation with the Attorney General and the Secretary of the Treasury, on February 20, 2025, acting pursuant to the authority in 8 U.S.C. 1189, the Secretary of State designated TdA as a Foreign Terrorist Organization.
As President of the United States and Commander in Chief, it is my solemn duty to protect the American people from the devastating effects of this invasion. NOW, THEREFORE, I, DONALD J. TRUMP, President of the United States of America, by the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including the Alien Enemies Act, 50 U.S.C. 21 et seq., hereby proclaim and direct as follows:
Section 1. I find and declare that TdA is perpetrating, attempting, and threatening an invasion or predatory incursion against the territory of the United States. TdA is undertaking hostile actions and conducting irregular warfare against the territory of the United States both directly and at the direction, clandestine or otherwise, of the Maduro regime in Venezuela.
I make these findings using the full extent of my authority to conduct the Nation’s foreign affairs under the Constitution. Based on these findings, and by the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including 50 U.S.C. 21, I proclaim that all Venezuelan citizens 14 years of age or older who are members of TdA, are within the United States, and are not actually naturalized or lawful permanent residents of the United States are liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed as Alien Enemies. I further find and declare that all such members of TdA are, by virtue of their membership in that organization, chargeable with actual hostility against the United States and are therefore ineligible for the benefits of 50 U.S.C. 22. I further find and declare that all such members of TdA are a danger to the public peace or safety of the United States. [emph. and hyperlinks added]
Claims to be acting as commander in chief against foreign enemies are the surest route to hands-off responses by the Courts of the United States. One need only recall the Korematsu case [approving removal of Japanese-American citizens to detention camps during WWII.] See also Winter v. NRDC, 555 U.S. 7 (2008) [need for nuclear readniess testing overrides statutory duty to protect endangered species] ; Seila Law, LLC v. Consumer Finance Protection Board (2022) [C.J. Roberts for the Court: "Article II vests the entire executive Power in the President alone”.]
The promise of Donald Trump that he would be a dictator only on "day one" is proving untrue. 50 U.S.C. 22 of which Trump denies the benefit, provides even ["an alien who becomes liable as an enemy [who is] not chargeable with actual hostility, or other crime against the public safety"] time and opportunity to get one's affairs in order prior to removal from the U.S.A. Such privileges are revoked according to the terms of the Proclamation. I'm reminded of Woody Guthrie's Deportee [Plane wreck at Los Gatos].
Unlike the notice and comment prescribed at 5 U.S.C. 553, which ordinarily precedes the adoption of administrative regulations, and vetting by the Executive Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs [OIRA], there is no mandated process for the monarchic function of a Proclamation.
IN J.G.G. v. Trump, a habeas corpus petition and class action complaint was filed on behalf of five Venezuelans seeking refuge as provided at 8 U.S.C. 1158. The ACLU and other immigration rights lawyers moved for an emergency TRO supported by affidavits of asylum seekers who fear persecution by the Maduro regime in Venezuela - a government the United States believes to be illegitimate. See District Court DOCKET
Chief Judge James Boasberg (D.C. D.C) issued a verbal order for the planes to turn back. They did not. On Monday, March 17, in a letter to the Clerk of the Court of Appeals, [see docket] Deputy Assistant Attorney General Drew Ensign declared their objection to the Court's "micromanagement supervision [and] hasty public inquiry into these sensitive national security matters." Ensign refused to explain the details of the government's non-compliance with the Judge's order to instruct the planes to turn around before landing in El Salvador where the captured immigrants are now detained.
In a sharp reply to the DOJ Judge Boasberg issued an order extending by a day the time for the Department of Justice to reply to his demand for explanations of who, how, and why Boasberg's order was not obeyed. The judge cites the Supreme Court's 1965 decision in Walker v. Birmingham, 388 U.S. 307 (1967) - upholding the contempt conviction of Martin Luther King. The message is that one must appeal, rather than disobey an Order with which one disagrees.
Adma Liptak, the Supreme Court reporter for the New York Times wrote:
“If anyone is being detained or removed based on the administration’s assertion that it can do so without judicial review or due process,” said Jamal Greene, a law professor at Columbia, “the president is asserting dictatorial power and ‘constitutional crisis’ doesn’t capture the gravity of the situation.”
Mr. Trump raised the stakes on Tuesday by calling for the impeachment of the judge who issued the order, James E. Boasberg of the Federal District Court in Washington, describing him on social media as a “Radical Left Lunatic.”
One of the ironies of U.S. political history is that unlike unitary states [the U.K. - parliamentary supremacy; People's Republic of China - National People's Congress legislates and may amend the Constitution] our national government was deprived from the first of the general "police power" to "promote the general welfare". The protection of proprietary chattel slavery drove that limitation - going so far as to supercede state sovereignty so that a slaveowner was guaranteed -by Constitution and statute - the right to recapture an escaped slave anywhere in the country.
Not even conquest of the southern Confederacy eliminated that. The great expansion of national power in the post-Civil War Enforcement Acts (e.g. 42 U.S.C. 1981 declaring equal rights under law) did not fully subordinate the states which elaborated the racial apartheid system known as Jim Crow. When the crowning achievement of the African American civil rights movement - the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed in the wake of the murder of John F. Kennedy - the Supreme Court in Heart of Atlanta Motel declared it to be lawful not on the ground of the post-civil war civil rights acts but only the ground that it was an exercise of the Commerce Clause power to regulate interstate commerce - Art. I, s 8, cl. 3, Constitution of the United States.
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