Last evening, I posted about the Trump Justice Department’s last-minute request that a federal judge cancel a hearing he’d scheduled to inquire into whether the administration had knowingly violated the order he had issued Saturday. That court order directed the administration to suspend its deportation of over 200 Venezuelan nationals and turn around any deportation flights that were already in the air. Despite this directive, the administration transferred the Venezuelans from Texas to El Salvador, whose government is being paid to detain them.
Chief Judge James Boasberg, an Obama appointee to the federal district court in Washington, D.C., declined to cancel yesterday’s 5 p.m. hearing. As it had foretold, the Justice Department refused to answer many of Judge Boasberg’s pointed questions about the apparent violation of his Saturday order. A prosecutor, Abhishek Kambli, instead repeated the administration’s incoherent party line that (a) it did not violate the judge’s order and (b) it will not, on purported “national security” grounds, reveal any information publicly about the timeline of when the flights took off and landed.
Comments