President Donald Trump on Tuesday claimed his administration would not openly defy court orders — despite declarations from top aides to not care about judges’ decisions amid a slew of rulings across the country against immigrant deportations and federal firings.
Trump appeared to take the multiple court losses personally.
He told Fox News host Laura Ingraham in an interview that nobody “has been through more courts than I have,” citing his experience as a criminal defendant in multiple court cases and countless civil lawsuits over the years, and complained he has had “the worst judges” in the various cases.
But when pressed by Ingraham on whether his administration would flout court orders from judges who have ordered his administration to stop deporting people under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act and on other court orders blocking his administration’s effort to shutter the U.S. Agency for International Development and fire tens of thousands of federal workers, Trump insisted that he “never did defy a court order” as president.
“No, you can't do that,” he said.
But the president also claimed that the courts are ruling against him because they are staffed by “very bad judges” who “shouldn’t be allowed” to make decisions that impinge on what he has claimed to be part and parcel of his authority as president.
Trump blasted veteran jurist U.S. District Judge James Boasberg — the chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia whose impeachment he had called for earlier in the day — “a lunatic.”
Trump’s launched his tirade against Boasberg after the federal judge held an emergency hearing on Monday to press government lawyers on defying a Saturday evening emergency order barring deportation of any Venezuelan national targeted under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act.
Trump had invoked the act late last week, claiming the country was under an “invasion” by Tren de Aragua, a criminal gang which the administration has declared to be a foreign terrorist organization linked to the Venezuelan government.
Boasberg’s order directed the administration not to remove anyone from the country after a group of Venezuelan nationals filed suit. The government has not deported those five named plaintiffs. But planes carrying roughly 250 others who were accused by the Trump administration of being members of Tren de Aragua left airports in Texas during a Saturday evening hearing shortly before Boasberg issued the order.
On Monday, at a second hearing demanded by Boasberg, the jurist became irate when Department of Justice lawyers insisted that they had urgent national security reasons for keeping the planes in the air instead of turning them around as ordered.
“Any plane that you put into the air in or around that time, you knew that I was having a hearing at 5,” the judge reportedly said.
Trump and his supporters subsequently called for Boasburg to be impeached because the president did not like his order. That protpted a rare rebuke from Supreme Court Chief Justice Roberts, who branded calls for impeachment “inappropriate.”
Trump told Ingraham he believes his administration’s policy will ultimately be upheld by the Supreme Court, which includes three justices who were named to the bench during his first term, because “the job of getting people out of our country that are murderers, that are absolutely the worst people ... that's a presidential thing.”
He added: “You have local judges, local federal judges ... that want to really take over. I think some of it's for the publicity. They love the publicity. All of a sudden they're on the front page of every newspaper, but they have no right to be.”
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