WASHINGTON — House Republicans are turning up the heat on US District Court Judge James Boasberg, scheduling hearings to investigate him and introducing legislation to claw back his power as he continues to block deportations of alleged Tren de Aragua members to Central America.
GOP lawmakers are eyeing two major bills — one to impeach Boasberg, the chief judge of the DC District Court, and another to restrict the use of nationwide injunctions.
In tandem with that legislation, House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) is planning to hold a hearing next week.
“When you look at Judge Boasberg, it starts to look like this is getting totally political from this guy,” Jordan told Fox News’ “America’s Newsroom” Monday.
“You got this judge [making] this crazy decision — ‘Turn the plane around, bring the bad guys back to America‘ — That makes no sense,” he added. “It really starts to look like Judge Boasberg is operating purely political[ly] against the president.”
The No Rogue Rulings Act, introduced by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), would bar district courts from issuing an “order providing for injunctive relief,” unless it applies only to specific parties who bring a case.
Over the last two decades, federal district courts have lodged dozens of nationwide injunctions against presidential administrations, restricting the government from certain types of action instead of just covering the parties involved in litigation.
There are at least 15 nationwide injunctions currently in place against the Trump administration. That’s significantly higher than the six against former President George W. Bush, 12 against former President Barack Obama and 14 against former President Joe Biden during their entire presidencies, according to a tally by Harvard Law Review.
Trump’s team has appealed one injunction, against his executive order eliminating birthright citizenship, to the US Supreme Court — where conservative justices such as Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch have expressed skepticism of nationwide orders.
“We have a crisis on the bench right now and not just with this or any single judge,” Issa said upon introducing his legislation last month. “[My bill] is the comprehensive solution we need to ensure that this problem does not occur anywhere in our federal judiciary and resets the proper and appropriate balance in our courts.”
Another effort to deal with Boasberg comes from Rep. Brandon Gill’s (R-Texas) legislation to impeach the judge, whom the lawmaker insisted was “guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors and should be removed from office.”
The impeachment push is unlikely to go anywhere, since Republicans hold narrow House and Senate majorities and a two-thirds vote in the upper chamber is needed to remove a jurist from the federal bench.
Talk about impeaching judges over disagreements with their rulings earned Trump a rare public rebuke from Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts last week.
Despite the mounting pressure, Boasberg has so far declined to budge.
On Monday, he rejected a Trump administration petition to lift his restraining order against the president’s use of wartime powers to fly alleged Venezuelan gangbangers to a notoriously brutal El Salvadorian mega-prison.
“Plaintiffs — as just explained — have shown that they have a high likelihood of suffering significant harm if the Proclamation is allowed to apply to them,” Boasberg, an Obama appointee, wrote in a 37-page opinion.
“There is, moreover, a strong public interest in preventing the mistaken deportation of people based on categories they have no right to challenge.”
Trump has attempted to utilize the 18th-century Alien Enemies Act to fly alleged Tren de Aragua members to El Salvador. So far, 260 migrants have arrived in the country, whose prison system has sparked human rights concerns due to overcrowding and inhuman treatment.
Officials, such as border czar Tom Homan, have waved off concerns that the migrants flown there weren’t given sufficient due process or were removed by mistake.
“A lot of gang members don’t have criminal histories,” Homan told ABC News’ “This Week” Sunday. “The bottom line is, that plane was full of people designated as terrorists, number one.”
“Number two, every Venezuelan migrant on that flight was a TdA member based on numerous criminal investigation[s] [or] intelligence reports and a lot of work by ICE officers.”
Boasberg had ordered deportation flights to be halted as he weighs a challenge from five removed Venezuelans who are being repped by the American Civil Liberties Union. He also demanded that deportation flights to El Salvador be turned around.
Three planes arrived March 15, with the Trump administration claiming Boasberg’s order had come too late to turn the planes around.
