This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at Balls and Strikes.
For a full year, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg has been trying to hold the Trump administration accountable for violating a court order that prohibited the government from arbitrarily sending immigration detainees to be imprisoned in El Salvador. Trump-appointed judges on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals have spent that year preventing him from doing so. On Tuesday, the D.C. Circuit issued its fourth order halting Boasberg’s contempt inquiry, which Judge Neomi Rao, a first-term Trump appointee, characterized in her majority opinion as “improper,” “unnecessary,” and “a clear abuse of discretion.”
The D.C. Circuit’s latest order directs Boasberg to “terminate” his criminal contempt proceedings. But the contempt inquiry is not likely to end here. Rao, a rumored candidate on Trump’s Supreme Court shortlist, was writing for a divided three-judge panel and joined by fellow Trump appointee Justin Walker. The attorneys for the wrongfully removed people plan to petition the full D.C. Circuit to review the panel’s decision. And six of the court’s 11 judges are already on record saying that Boasberg properly exercised his contempt authority, and that an earlier panel was wrong to cut off the district court’s investigative process.
