Sargent: It’s funny you brought that up because we have examples now of the Trump administration potentially violating court orders. On another frontier, Trump has invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to speed up deportations, but a federal judge has already blocked this because, to oversimplify, we have to be in a declared war with a foreign nation or government or under invasion from one to invoke this thing. What’s at issue, though, is whether the administration failed to order planes carrying migrants to turn around and come back after the judge ordered it. Matt, can you walk us through this piece?
Seligman: Yes. I’ll just preface this by saying the facts on the ground here about what was happening in the courtroom, what was happening on the docket, and what was happening in the air are very complicated and, to a certain extent, in dispute. But it looks like what happened is that there was an emergency hearing in Washington, D.C., before a federal judge, Judge Boasberg, who’s very well respected and is the chief judge of the district court in Washington, D.C., brought by the ACLU just that morning on Saturday. During the hearing, Judge Boasberg issued an order saying that the government could not deport anyone, or remove anyone in the technical parlance, pursuant to this proclamation that President Trump had signed the day before invoking the Alien Enemies Act. That was issued at some time like 6:30 or 6:40 at night during the hearing, and it wasn’t until about 7:30 that evening that there was a written order that appeared on the docket.
This is extremely common because [in] oral hearings, the judge will make a decision and then issue a written order that memorializes [their decisions]. Now, there’s been some discussion today that oral orders are somehow not legally valid, and that is, to put it lightly, absolute legal hogwash. Of course they’re valid. So what the government has now claimed…. And they’re toggling—and different people in the government are saying slightly different things—but the best that I can tell is that the overall position of the administration is that for technical reasons having to do with when exactly the planes were in the air and when the orders were issued, they didn’t actually violate the order, but they could.
