One of the investigations likely to follow if Democrats take over the House concerns the extent to which President Donald Trump’s administration ignored court orders at the direction of those at the highest level of government. One ACLU lawyer is still fighting a case that dates back to the first few months of the Trump administration.
ACLU deputy director of the Immigrant Rights Project, Lee Gelernt, revealed that since U.S. District Court Chief Judge James Boasberg’s February 2025 order, he’s been fighting the federal government to return people who were wrongfully deported to the brutal El Salvadorian prison for being alleged “gang members.”
This week Gelernt argued before an appeals court that they should uphold Boasberg’s order.
“What they are saying is they can essentially whisk people away to a foreign prison, give them no opportunity to contest the removal, even whether they’re part of this gang that proclamation applies to, concede that they violated due process under *J.G.G. [v. Trump] * and *A.A.R.P. [v. Trump]*, and then say because we got them out of the country into a foreign prison that’s the end of the matter,” Gelernt said in court, according to CourtHouse News.
Speaking to Jacob Soboroff on MS NOW, Gelernt recalled the way that the administration was circumventing the law and the judge to do whatever they wanted regardless of the judiciary.
“By then, we already knew the planes had taken off,” he recalled from the emergency hearing. The judge agreed, ordered the planes to turn around, the government refused. On Friday, the Justice Department went into court and said, they couldn’t do anything because they’d already done what they were ordered not to do.
“Tough luck. They’re out of the country as if the men got there on their own,” said Gelernt, recalling the hearing on Friday. “Then, without a trace of irony, they said that they had violated the order not to send them. They said, there’s just nothing you can do for them. And then they went on to say, well, this is probably a one-off. We’re not going to do it anymore.”
He claimed that these kinds of actions by the DOJ have continued.
Gelernt said that Judge Boasberg found it appalling and said, ” Look, you know, these men are entitled to a hearing; you’re conceding you didn’t give them due process. And so I’m going to give you the choice. Do you want to give them hearings remotely? Do you want to let them come back? You can detain them if they come back, but one way or the other, there’s now overwhelming evidence that these men had no ties to this gang. And that you can’t use the Alien Enemies Act during peacetime against a gang. It was a military law.”
CourthouseNews reporter Ryan Knappenberger said that it appeared the three-judge panel was split on the matter, but Gelernt said it doesn’t matter. If they vote against him they intend to see a full vote by the entire panel. The Trump administration is likely to go to the U.S. Supreme Court at that point.
“As some conservative judges have already said, that’s a blueprint for just lawlessness. For the rule of law just going out the window,” said Gelernt. “I mean, a number of judges have already come out and said, this is a grave threat to the rule of law if the executive branch can get away with violating orders.”
The problem, he said, is that it’s setting up for a larger showdown between the executive branch and the judiciary.
“I think if the Court of Appeals doesn’t have Judge Boasberg back, not only for him, but for the judiciary as a whole, it’s going to send a terrible signal that the executive branch can just get away with these kinds of things,” he closed.
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