The Trump Administration appeared to openly defy multiple court orders over the weekend, deepening concerns among Democrats and legal experts that the constitutional crisis many feared when President Donald Trump was elected has now arrived.
On Saturday, federal officials ignored an order from Judge James E. Boasberg of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, who had directed the government to turn around deportation flights carrying Venezuelan detainees. Instead, the planes continued on their course to El Salvador, where President Nayib Bukele, a Trump ally, boasted that the 238 detainees would be held for at least a year in the country’s Terrorism Confinement Center. “Oopsie … Too late,” Bukele wrote on social media, a post later amplified by White House officials. Secretary of State Marco Rubio expressed gratitude to the Salvadoran president, pointedly ignoring the judge’s ruling.
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A day earlier, in Boston, a similar scenario played out. A federal judge had issued a restraining order to block the deportation of Rasha Alawieh, a Brown University medical professor with a valid visa returning from a family visit to Lebanon. Despite the order, she was deported anyway.
Taken together, the incidents suggest that the Trump Administration is increasingly willing to brush aside judicial authority in pursuit of its policy goals. It follows a pattern in which Trump and his allies have sought to test the limits of judicial power, sometimes circumventing rulings, other times attacking judges outright.
The country is “far beyond” a constitutional crisis, says Kim Wehle, a law professor at the University of Baltimore and a former assistant U.S. attorney. “A constitutional crisis is the accumulation of unchecked power in one branch. We’ve seen now for weeks the Trump Administration ignoring acts of Congress,” says Wehle, noting that the President has ignored Congress’ constitutional power of the purse by withholding federal funds and by terminating federal employees and senior officials without cause.
Other legal scholars, while alarmed, hesitate to label the administration’s actions as an outright crisis. Amanda Frost, a law professor at the University of Virginia, describes the administration as challenging the courts thus far up to a point.
“I don’t want to call it a constitutional crisis because I’m waiting to see them say in their own words, ‘We will not comply with court orders anymore,’” says Frost, who is the director of UVA’s Immigration, Migration, and Human Rights Program. “They have yet to say that. And while they’ve done some things to violate corners of the margins, they have so far followed along.”
She adds, “I’m very concerned and think they’re being very disingenuous…but I would not say that they have yet crossed the line of suggesting they no longer feel that they need to abide by the rule of law.”
Yet signs of open defiance are emerging. White House officials have said the judge’s order came after planes carrying the Venezuelan migrants had already left the U.S. Tom Homan, Trump’s White House “border czar,” dismissed the weekend’s rulings, telling Fox News on Monday that the court orders had come too late to make a difference.
“We’re not stopping,” Homan said. “I don’t care what the judges think.”
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, when asked to clarify those comments Monday afternoon, insisted that the Administration is complying with the court order, even though the planes with Venezuelan deportees landed in El Salvador hours after the judge gave verbal instructions to Justice Department attorneys that the flights must return to the U.S. “We are quite confident in that, and we are wholly confident that we are going to win this case in court,” Leavitt told reporters. She also said there are “questions about whether a verbal order carries the same weight as a … written order.”
Federal judges are now weighing how to respond to cases that may end up before the Supreme Court. Judge Boasberg scheduled a Monday evening hearing to determine whether the administration defied his ruling. In Massachusetts, Judge Leo T. Sorokin has demanded an explanation from the government for why Dr. Alawieh was deported in apparent violation of his order.
The Administration says it invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798—a wartime law rarely used in modern history—to deport Venezuelans who the government say belong to the Tren de Aragua gang, without due process. Federal courts have repeatedly ruled against the administration’s use of emergency powers, including on immigration and border security, yet officials have continued to push forward in ways that some see as ignoring or undermining the judiciary’s authority.
In the case of Dr. Alawieh, who is Lebanese, the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that she “openly admitted” to CBP officers her support for a Hezbollah leader and attended their funeral. “A visa is a privilege not a right—glorifying and supporting terrorists who kill Americans is grounds for visa issuance to be denied,” the statement said. “This is commonsense security.” The official White House account on X said: “Bye-bye, Rasha” with a hand waving emoji. Alawieh was sent back to Lebanon, even though the judge ordered on Friday that she be kept in the U.S. and brought to a court hearing on Monday.
Legal scholars warn that if courts allow such defiance to go unpunished, the judiciary’s ability to serve as a check on executive power could be permanently weakened. “There is an accumulation of power in one place,” Wehle says. “That means Donald Trump becomes the law. The law is what he sees the law to be. He picks and chooses winners and losers.”
“The checks and balances are gone,” she adds.
The Trump Administration is working aggressively to shape public perception of both the deportations and its defiance of the courts as wins for the American people. Social media posts from administration officials and pro-Trump influencers have celebrated the deportations. One post showed a video of shackled men being led onto the planes, accompanied by Semisonic’s 1998 song “Closing Time.”