How the White House ignored a judge's order to turn back deportation flights

The Trump administration says it ignored a Saturday court order to turn around two planeloads of alleged Venezuelan gang members
-- because the flights were over international waters and therefore the ruling "didn't apply", two senior officials tell Axios.

Why it matters:
The administration's decision to defy a federal judge's order is exceedingly rare and highly controversial.

"Court order defied. First of many as I've been warning and start of true constitutional crisis,"
national security attorney Mark S. Zaid,
a Trump critic, wrote on X,
-- adding that Trump could ultimately be impeached.

The White House welcomes that fight.

"This is headed to the Supreme Court. And we're going to win,"
a senior White House official told Axios.

A second administration official said Trump was not defying the judge whose ruling came too late for the planes to change course:

"Very important that people understand we are not actively defying court orders."

State of play:
Trump's advisers contend U.S. District Judge #James #Boasberg overstepped his authority by issuing an order that blocked the president from deporting about 250 alleged Tren de Aragua gang members under the "Alien Enemies Act of 1789".

The war-time law gives the executive extreme immense power to deport noncitizens without a judicial hearing.

But it has been little-used, and never in peacetime.

"It's the showdown that was always going to happen between the two branches of government,"
a senior White House official said.

"And it seemed that this was pretty clean. You have [[alleged]] Venezuelan gang members ... These are bad guys, as the president would say."

How it happened: White House Deputy Chief of Staff #Stephen #Miller "orchestrated" the process in the West Wing in tandem with Homeland Security Secretary #Kristy #Noem.

Few outside their teams knew what was happening.

They didn't actually set out to defy a court order.

"We wanted them on the ground first, before a judge could get the case,
but this is how it worked out,"
said the official.

The timeline:
Trump signed the executive order invoking the Alien Enemies Act on Friday night,
but intentionally did not advertise it.

On Saturday morning, word of the order leaked, officials said,
prompting a mad scramble to get planes in the air.

At 2:31 p.m. Saturday, an immigration activist who tracks deportation flights, posted on X that
"TWO HIGHLY UNUSUAL ICE flights"
were departing from Texas to El Salvador,
which had agreed to accept Venezuelan gang members deported from the U.S.

Hours later,
during a court hearing filed by the ACLU.,
Boasberg ordered a halt to the deportations and said any flights should be turned around mid-air.

"This is something that you need to make sure is complied with immediately,"
he told the Justice Department,
according to the Washington Post.

At that point,
about 6:51 p.m.,
both flights were off the Yucatan Peninsula, according to flight paths posted on X.

Inside the White House, officials discussed whether to order the planes to turn around.

On advice from a team of administration lawyers,
the administration pressed ahead.

"There was a discussion about how far the judge's ruling can go under the circumstances and over international waters and, on advice of counsel, we proceeded with deporting these thugs,"
the senior official said.

"They were already outside of US airspace. We believe the order is not applicable,"
a second senior administration official told Axios.

Yes, but:
The Trump administration was already spoiling for a fight over the Alien Enemies Act
— one of several fronts on which they believe legal challenges to the president's authority will only end up strengthening it when the Supreme Court rules in his favor.

Between the lines:
Officially, the Trump White House is not denying it ignored the judge's order,
and instead wants to shift the argument to whether it was right to expel alleged members of Tren de Aragua.

"If the Democrats want to argue in favor of turning a plane full of [[alleged]] rapists, murderers, and gangsters back to the United States,
that's a fight we are more than happy to take,"
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told Axios when asked about the case.

It's unclear how many of the roughly 250 Venezuelans were deported under the Alien Enemies Act
and how many were kicked out of the U.S. due to other immigration laws.

It's also not clear whether all of them were actually gang members.

https://www.axios.com/2025/03/16/trump-white-house-defy-judge-deport-venezuelans

On Friday, the Supreme Court decided to hear a case,
Braidwood Mgmt., Inc. v. Becerra,
that will decide the constitutionality of the preventable care requirements of the Affordable Care Act, or ACA.

Under the ACA, health insurers are obligated to cover preventative health services at no cost to the patient.

This includes everything from vaccines against deadly viruses
to breast and cervical cancer screenings,
to statins for heart disease.

It also notably includes HIV prevention under that umbrella—and for good reason.
Not only is it the humane thing to do,
it also saves health insurers a lot of money.
Just as it’s far cheaper to conduct a pap smear and catch cervical cancer in its early stages than it is to provide end-of-life care for those about to succumb to the disease,
so too does preventative care lessen the burden of HIV on patients, doctors, and insurers.

This particular lawsuit originated in Texas,
where a handful of Christian businessowners objected to providing the HIV prevention drug regimen known as PrEP to their employees.
One of the employers is represented by the #Stephen #Miller–led legal group "America First Lega"l,
which argued that the requirement
“promotes homosexual behavior”
and therefore violates its client’s
“religious beliefs by making him complicit in encouraging those behaviors.”

In his ruling, a Trump-appointed federal judge specifically carved out HIV prevention as a violation of the employers’ constitutional rights,
writing that the PrEP mandate “substantially burdens [their] religious exercise.”
The case then went to the conservative-leaning Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals,
which ruled the requirement is unconstitutional because the
"U.S. Preventative Services Task Force", or USPSTF,
which decides what preventative care services should be covered under the ACA,
is not appointed by the president and approved by Congress.
Put differently, the Fifth Circuit is upset that basic medical decisions are decided by an independent volunteer panel of national experts in disease prevention and evidence-based medicine,
and not by a group of appointees with a political agenda.

For now, the Fifth Circuit’s ruling only applies to the Texas businessowners who have won the right to deny HIV care to their employees.
But if SCOTUS rules in the Christian employers’ favor, Trump will appoint members to the USPSTF,
and the Republican-majority Congress will then be allowed to confirm his choices.

The fallout of this decision would not only impact those at high risk of contracting HIV.
With public health potentially falling under the auspices of noted vaccine-cynic #Bobby #Kennedy Jr.,
parents with immune-compromised children will have another reason to worry -- that their child’s classmates aren’t up to date with their vaccines.

A woo-woo “wellness”-obsessed Department of Health and Human Services secretary could also decide that mental illnesses,
such as anxiety and depression,
are best treated with meditation and the like, and cut mental and behavioral health services from the preventative care requirement.
But the fallout from this change in command may fall most cruelly on those who live with HIV,
who have benefited from considerable medical advancement since the bad old days of Jesse Helms.

https://newrepublic.com/article/190167/supreme-court-hiv-prep-obamacare

Your government is in the hands of super-rich people who never had to show anything to anybody!

And you can bet they plan to run the country the same way they have run their companies:

using shell games and pyramid schemes, fraud and shakedown, answerable to virtually no one.

These are people who have thrived in a culture of unaccountability and self-dealing.

They are also people who have convinced themselves that the accrual of wealth to themselves is a boon to the nation at large.

They like to think of themselves as job creators, dynamic players in shaping the global economy.

Because their magnificence exists to benefit us all, the reasoning goes, they need not show us the methods by which they perform their magic.

And indeed we do all stand, mouths agape, at the show, dazzled by the 22,000-square-foot mansion
(with a 6,200-square-foot guest house)
that serves as the home address of secretary of education #Betsy #DeVos,
or the 203-foot yacht (with an elevator inside) owned by #Robert #Mercer, the Trump donor and patron of chief White House strategist #Stephen K. #Bannon.

(Mercer’s daughter, #Rebekah, is said to have great influence in the West Wing.)

The source of Mercer’s wealth is Renaissance Technologies LLC, a privately owned firm known as a hedge-fund sponsor,
which was built by scientists who learned how to run algorithms that identify signals emanating from great masses of data in order to generate profitable financial trades.

After Renaissance founder and math wizard James Simons, a big donor to Democratic candidates and political action committees, retired and kicked himself upstairs to serve as the company’s chairman,
Mercer became co-CEO with #Peter #Brown, his longtime research partner.

At the Renaissance office in East Setauket on New York’s Long Island, no sign is visible from the road to tell you you’ve arrived at the headquarters of a rare kind of casino
—one that moves billions of dollars around the world.

Thick plantings of trees obscure any view of the low-slung Renaissance building from the public side of the security gate.

Renaissance is spectacularly successful
—Investopedia named Renaissance Institutional Equities, the LLC’s largest entity,
the top-performing hedge fund of 2016,
after it yielded investors a return of 20 percent for the year.

Mercer’s genius as a data and systems geek is part of the super-secret sauce of this “quant fund”
that turned other people’s assets-minus-liabilities into riches for his investors.

It’s like a very complicated version of counting cards at the blackjack table.

But the best-performing fund at Renaissance is one that only its employees can join
—and indeed they must in order to actualize their full compensation package.

Bloomberg’s Katherine Burton described the employee-only Medallion fund as
“finance’s blackest box.”
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/what-we-do-is-secret-stan

A dollar is a dollar is a dollar
But some dollars are different, because of how their owners obtain them and move them about.

These are the dark dollars of private companies, dollars slithery in their expert avoidance of taxes, their paths rendered invisible by the absence of footprints.

Critics of the Trump White House point to the obscene levels of wealth that you find among the inner circle of President Trump’s appointees and associates.

Just as striking, though, is the provenance of all this loose cash:
Trump’s trusted advisers have come into much of this wealth through private companies,
whose financial balance sheets and so much more are shielded from public view.

At least ten of Trump’s close political associates, including some of his cabinet picks, hail from the carefully shrouded world of private capital.

Private companies play by a different set of rules than those governing firms that trade their shares on stock exchanges.

Unlike their publicly traded counterparts, private companies don’t have to worry about facing irate shareholders.

That’s because a private company’s principals have chosen those shareholders, who are often drawn from a founder’s family.

No proxy fights or hostile takeovers to worry about; no bending to the will of big institutional investors.

This is not to say that there are no big donors to Democrats who don’t also get their dough from private companies.

For example, Democrats have long enjoyed the largesse of the Pritzker family, who took their Hyatt Corporation public only in 2009.

Until then, it was a closely held private company.

But no Democratic administration was ever dominated by the owners of privately held entities,
and no administration of either party has ever represented so much wealth derived from such secretive entities.

Little in the way of financial disclosure is required of privately held companies. When it comes to financial regulation, these companies reap the benefit of the government’s failure to call them to account.

The same is true of private companies as large as the Koch Industries conglomerate or as adorably tiny as a startup founded by a lone millennial in a stocking cap.

Sanctums of Privilege

This is not a screed against private companies. As a red-blooded American, I revel in tales of heroic entrepreneurship
—of hatched-in-the-garage ideas that yield their underdog executors an unlikely pot of gold.

This is, rather, a scream, the wail of a blues tune sung to my fellow red-blooded Americans:

Your government is in the hands of super-rich people who never had to show anything to anybody!

And you can bet they plan to run the country the same way they have run their companies:

using shell games and pyramid schemes, fraud and shakedown, answerable to virtually no one.

These are people who have thrived in a culture of unaccountability and self-dealing.

They are also people who have convinced themselves that the accrual of wealth to themselves is a boon to the nation at large.

They like to think of themselves as job creators, dynamic players in shaping the global economy.

Because their magnificence exists to benefit us all, the reasoning goes, they need not show us the methods by which they perform their magic.

And indeed we do all stand, mouths agape, at the show, dazzled by the 22,000-square-foot mansion
(with a 6,200-square-foot guest house)
that serves as the home address of secretary of education #Betsy #DeVos,
or the 203-foot yacht (with an elevator inside) owned by #Robert #Mercer, the Trump donor and patron of chief White House strategist #Stephen K. #Bannon.

(Mercer’s daughter, #Rebekah, is said to have great influence in the West Wing.)

The source of Mercer’s wealth is Renaissance Technologies LLC, a privately owned firm known as a hedge-fund sponsor,
which was built by scientists who learned how to run algorithms that identify signals emanating from great masses of data in order to generate profitable financial trades.

After Renaissance founder and math wizard James Simons, a big donor to Democratic candidates and political action committees, retired and kicked himself upstairs to serve as the company’s chairman,
Mercer became co-CEO with #Peter #Brown, his longtime research partner.

At the Renaissance office in East Setauket on New York’s Long Island, no sign is visible from the road to tell you you’ve arrived at the headquarters of a rare kind of casino
—one that moves billions of dollars around the world.

Thick plantings of trees obscure any view of the low-slung Renaissance building from the public side of the security gate.

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/what-we-do-is-secret-stan