The legal maneuvering and outright defiance that President Donald Trump’s administration has displayed surrounding the deportation flights to El Salvador that a federal judge ordered to turn around and return to the United States prompted MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow to issue a dire warning.
Maddow on Wednesday read directly from U.S. District Judge James Boasberg’s 46-page opinion in which he found probable cause to hold Trump’s administration in contempt of court over officials’ rush to deport hundreds of people despite the judge’s order.
“They are on the edge of contempt, which is on the edge of the end,” the MSNBC host said as she broke down for viewers what she sees behind the ruling.
“If you want to know where contempt of court is on the map of the death of the republic, it's that thing right on the edge of the abyss,” she said. “You get up to approaching the cliff, there's the signs telling you you're getting close to the edge, and then you go past the signs, and then you get right up to the edge, it's contempt of court, it's right there.”
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Maddow said ever since the international debacle surrounding the flights took off last month, the judge has been demanding answers “about who exactly made the decision to defy his legally binding order and when and how and who else is implicated in this mess.”
But the judge made clear on Wednesday “that he is done playing games,” Maddow added.
“He gave the Trump administration until Wednesday next week, one week, to either fix this mess by having the U.S. government retake custody of all those people that shipped to El Salvador, or start handing over the names of Trump officials for the judge to hold in criminal contempt,” the host said.
She concluded: “We are getting to it here.”
