Judge holds Trump DHS 'in contempt' after 'deeply disturbing' move: legal expert

A judge leveled a decision that was tantamount to finding Donald Trump's administration in contempt of its order, following the government's "deeply disturbing" move, a former prosecutor said.

Former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance weighed in via a Substack post dated Thursday. In the write-up, the legal analyst flagged "preliminary reports" from this week showing "that a small group of people who were not legally in this country were being deported to Sudan."

"But none of them came from that country. Early reports suggested a Burmese man and a Vietnamese man were included in the group that was being summarily deported. The facts were confused. Lawyers went to court quickly," she wrote, adding that "this wasn’t the government’s first outing involving these individuals in the case in front of" U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy in Boston.

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According to Vance, the judge "had previously entered an order that the government appeared to be in clear violation of."

"The case is a class action filed on behalf of people who are deportable—people who the government has obtained final orders to remove—but whose home countries either won’t accept them or are places they have credible or reasonable fear of being persecuted, tortured, or killed if they are returned to them," she wrote. "After the case was filed, Judge Murphy entered a temporary restraining order preventing deportations to third-party countries without notice. Although the government asked the First Circuit to countermand his order, they declined to."

What happened next, according to Vance, "is deeply disturbing."

"Despite the court order, DHS removed four people in the class to Guantanamo, where the Department of Defense supposedly took over, flying them to a third country," according to the ex-prosecutor. "The government argued it hadn’t violated the court’s order, since the Defense Department wasn’t a defendant in the case and the court’s order didn’t apply to them. In other words, a level of sophistry the government—the non-Trump government at least—doesn’t use in its dealings with the courts. There was an utter absence of good faith."

That takes us to Wednesday night, when the judge "entered his order on the plaintiffs’ requests for injunctions to keep the government from deporting them while the litigation is underway."

"The Judge styled his order as a 'Remedy For Violation Of Preliminary Injunctions.' That is tantamount to saying the government was in contempt of his order," Vance wrote. "It is perhaps nicer and softer and less confrontational, but that is, essentially, what it is."

Noting the good reasons for the "softer approach," Vance said, "the judge is giving the government the opportunity to comply and avoid an outright confrontation."

"That should be everyone’s first choice. But ultimately, you can’t avoid a collision with someone who wants one," she added. "This may be the case the government has chosen for the head-on collision, and if so, the Judge will have done everything he can to make that clear when the case goes on appeal to the Supreme Court, as it inevitably will if that happens."

Read the full post right here.