Trump calls for impeaching judge who questioned deportation of Venezuelans

WASHINGTON - U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday called for the impeachment of a judge who asked his administration to explain why it deported planeloads of Venezuelans despite his temporary ban on removing them.

U.S. District Judge James Boasberg on Monday ruled that Justice Department lawyers must answer questions by noon Eastern Time (1600 GMT) over deportation flights to El Salvador made possible by Trump invoking a 1798 law designed for wartime use.

In a Tuesday morning Truth Social post that continued his long history of using heated rhetoric against judges who rule against his interests, Trump described Boasberg, an appointee of Democratic former President Barack Obama, as a far-left "troublemaker and agitator."

"I'm just doing what the VOTERS wanted me to do," Trump wrote. "This judge, like many of the Crooked Judges' I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED." 

Since Trump's Jan. 20 inauguration, congressional Republicans, the billionaire Elon Musk, and other Trump allies have called for the impeachment of federal judges or attacked their integrity in response to court rulings that have slowed the administration's moves. 

That has coincided with warnings by U.S. Marshals that federal judges face unusually high threat levels. 

Tuesday's post marked the first time during his second term as president that Trump has called for a judge's impeachment. 

Trump's attack on Boasberg comes after the judge sought clarity on when exactly the president invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to declare that the Venezuelan prison gang Tren de Aragua was conducting irregular warfare against the United States, and when the deportation flights took off. 

The Trump administration says those being deported were members of the gang and that it began removing them on Saturday before the judge ordered that any flight be halted or returned to the United States.

The administration's lawyers have also argued that the court's authority on the matter was limited, fueling concerns that the Republican president is further pushing the boundaries of executive power and setting up a potential constitutional clash with the judiciary. 

Tren de Aragua is a feared criminal organization involved in human trafficking in South America, but despite Trump's claim the group was invading the United States, there has been little documented evidence of any large-scale operation in the country.

In a court filing on Monday night, Department of Homeland Security official Robert Cerna acknowledged that many of the deported Venezuelans the White House says are Tren de Aragua members did not have criminal records in the United States. 

Cerna said one individual deported had been charged with murder, and that several had been charged with assault in the United States. He said many of them had pending charges or convictions outside the United States. He did not say how many of the 137 people removed under the Alien Enemies Act had criminal records. 

A lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed the request that led Boasberg to halt deportations, questioned Trump's assertion that the deported immigrants belonged to Tren de Aragua.

"This has been a habit of the Trump administration to overstate the danger of the people they've arrested," he said.

TWO-WEEK HALT

Boasberg on Saturday imposed a two-week halt to deportations under Trump's proclamation, writing that the Alien Enemies Act did not provide a basis for Trump's assertion that Tren de Aragua's alleged presence in the U.S. was akin to an act of war. 

According to a Reuters timeline, Boasberg's oral ruling that "any plane containing these folks ... needs to be returned to the United States" was issued between 6:45 p.m. and 6:48 p.m. Eastern Time. At that hour, two of the three flights were in the air.

A third flight took off at 7:37 p.m., or 12 minutes after the judge's written order was published. The Trump team has said that the third flight carried deportees processed under other immigration statutes and therefore was not subject to the order.

All three flights, which each made a preliminary stop in Honduras, landed in El Salvador late Saturday night or Sunday morning Eastern Time, hours after the judge's oral and written rulings.

When Boasberg asked for information, some of it available on public flight-tracking sites, Justice Department lawyer Abhishek Kambli told the judge that the Trump administration was resistant to sharing that information because there was "a lot of operational national security and foreign relations at risk." REUTERS