U.S District Court Judge James Boasberg was handed a defeat Friday in his bid to slap criminal contempt charges against Trump administration officials he said defied his order to block the deportation of criminal illegal immigrants.
Boasberg had sought to rein in the administration from using the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelans and had threatened criminal contempt charges after finding that officials violated a Temporary Restraining Order he gave that planes heading for El Salvador with criminal illegal immigrants should return to the United States.
The 2-1 ruling of the panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit threw out the charges in what was dubbed “a massive victory for the Trump administration,” by CBS.
Judges Gregory Katsas and Neomi Rao, both of whom were appointed by President Donald Trump in his first term, supported the ruling.
Judge Cornelia Pillard, who was appointed by former President Barack Obama, dissented.
Each judge wrote separate opinions. In his, Katsas called the dispute “an extraordinary, ongoing confrontation between the Executive and Judicial Branches.”
He wrote that Boasberg’s actions were designed to “vindicate a TRO that the Supreme Court had vacated for lack of jurisdiction,” using the acronym for a Temporary Restraining Order.
“The district court’s order raises troubling questions about judicial control over core executive functions like the conduct of foreign policy and the prosecution of criminal offenses,” he wrote.
He said the case also concerns “an unsettled issue whether the judiciary may impose criminal contempt for violating injunctions entered without jurisdiction.”
He added that “the government is plainly correct about the merits of the criminal contempt, and our saying so now would prevent long disputes between the Executive and the Judiciary over difficult, contentious issues regarding the courts’ power to control foreign policy or prosecutions, or to impose criminal sanctions for violating injunctions entered without jurisdiction.”
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“[Boasberg]’s abuse of the contempt power is especially egregious”
Boasberg is totally out of control—he needs to be impeached.
No more excuses. @SpeakerJohnson https://t.co/vD44nEf8jM— John Strand (@JohnStrandUSA) August 8, 2025
Referring to the contempt charges threat, Rao wrote that “the district court cannot use the threat of such punishment as a backdoor to obtain compliance with a vacated and therefore unenforceable TRO.”
“The district court’s abuse of the contempt power is especially egregious because contempt proceedings against senior Executive Branch officials carry profound ‘separation of power[s] overtones’ that demand the most ‘sensitive judicial scrutiny.’”
In short, she wrote, Boasberg’s effort “exceeds the court’s authority and amounts to a clear abuse of discretion,”
Pillard said the legal system requires blind obedience to a judge.
“Our system of courts cannot long endure if disappointed litigants defy court orders with impunity rather than legally challenge them. That is why willful disobedience of a court order is punishable as criminal contempt,” Pillar wrote.
“When it appears that a judicial order has been disobeyed, the court’s ability to learn who was responsible is the first step to accountability.”
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