One of the extraordinary features of the first year of President Trump’s second term has been the attempted judicial coup by Democratic Party district court judges who have, in effect, tried to take over the operation of the Executive Branch. Rogue district judges have issued one ill-founded order after another, most of which have been reversed on appeal. Perhaps the worst offender has been James Boasberg, Chief Judge of the D.C. District Court.
Judge Boasberg has been trying to hold members of the Trump administration in criminal contempt for, allegedly, disobeying one of his illegal orders. The government made a mandamus motion in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals to stop Boasberg’s unconstitutional actions. Today, a panel of the D.C. Circuit granted the motion and ordered Boasberg to stop harassing the Trump administration. Each of the three judges on the panel authored an opinion that you can read here. I will simply quote the beginning of the majority opinion by Judge Neomi Rao. It gives you a sense of how far out of bounds Boasberg has gone in his effort to serve the interests of his political party:
More than a year ago, the President invoked the Alien Enemies Act against members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan criminal gang and foreign terrorist organization, and ordered that they be detained and removed from the United States. In a series of fast-moving events on March 15, 2025, the government placed a group of alleged gang members, including plaintiffs in this case, on planes to El Salvador. After the planes took off and left the country, the district court ordered the government not to remove the plaintiffs from the United States.
The Supreme Court vacated the district court’s order because it was premised on a legal error and the plaintiffs’ suit was brought in the wrong court. Nonetheless, the district court threatened to hold government officials in criminal contempt unless they complied with the now-vacated order by, for instance, taking back custody of the plaintiffs. We issued a writ of mandamus vacating the court’s first contempt order.
Undeterred, the district court is proceeding with criminal contempt for the government’s decision to transfer the plaintiffs to the custody of El Salvador. To cooperate, the government identified then-Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem as the official responsible for the transfer decision. The district court previously said this was the only information it required to make a referral for prosecution. But the district court has now expanded its inquest and ordered hearings to extract more information from government counsel about exactly what happened last March. The government petitions for mandamus.
The widening gyre of the district court’s investigation again calls for the extraordinary remedy of mandamus to halt the judicial “impairment of another branch in the performance of its constitutional duties.” Cheney v. U.S. Dist. Ct. for D.C.,542 U.S. 367, 390 (2004) (cleaned up). The district court proposes to probe high-level Executive Branch deliberations about matters of national security and diplomacy. These proceedings are a clear abuse of discretion, as the district court’s order said nothing about transferring custody of the plaintiffs and therefore lacks the clarity to support criminal contempt based on the transfer of custody. Moreover, the government has already provided the name of the responsible official, so further judicial investigation is unnecessary and therefore improper. In these circumstances, mandamus is appropriate to prevent the district court from assuming an antagonistic jurisdiction that encroaches on the autonomy of the Executive Branch.
Emphasis added. The assault on the rule of law by rogue judges like James Boasberg is one of the most troubling political developments of our time.
