I am traveling and haven’t been able to weigh in on the Trump administration’s deportation of somewhere between 230 and 300 Venezuelans whom the administration alleges (but has not proved) are members of the atrocious Tren de Aragua gang, which the administration has designated as a foreign terrorist organization despite never having prosecuted it on terrorist charges.

The president ordered the deportation with no court process purportedly pursuant to the Alien Enemy Act, a late 18th century statute (now codified at Section 21 of Title 50, U.S. Code), which applies only to wartime conditions and has only been invoked three times in American history — during the congressionally declared wars of 1812, World War I, and World War II.

I will get to the various problems with the administration’s theories in separate posts. For now, the latest state of play is this: It is near certain that the administration knowingly defied an order issued Saturday evening by Chief Judge James Boasberg (an Obama appointee to the federal district court in Washington, D.C.) to suspend the initiative to deport the Venezuelans, which included an admonition to turn around any deportation flights that had already departed and return the detainees to the United States. While a prosecutor temporized about whether he had information necessary to answer Judge Boasberg’s questions about whether deportation flights had taken off, the flights were under way and continued on their path — to El Salvador, it turned out, which had worked out a deal with the State Department to incarcerate the alleged gang members there.

The Justice Department tried to end-run further proceedings before Judge Boasberg by filing an immediate appeal to the D.C. Circuit. The circuit issued an order on Sunday, directing the filing of a brief tomorrow by the ACLU and other lawyers for the Venezuelans (five of the detainees were the initial petitioners in the lower court, but now all similar situated detainees are implicated). The Justice Department has been directed to respond the following day.

Meantime, Judge Boasberg has ordered the administration to appear at a hearing that he planned to hold at 5 p.m. Monday in order to probe whether Trump officials knowingly defied his order on Saturday. According to the New York Times, the administration is being defiant about its prior apparent defiance. The Justice Department has asked Boasberg to cancel the hearing because “the government is not prepared to disclose any further national security or operational security details [about the deportation flights] to plaintiffs or the public.”

Given that the circuit has taken jurisdiction (at least to decide whether to intervene), it seems odd that the Justice Department is being confrontational; it could simply ask that Boasberg cancel his hearing because jurisdiction over the matter now lies with the higher court.

Instead, it is basically telling a judge it has already ignored not to bother to have the hearing because it’s not going to tell him anything. In statements to the public, moreover, the administration’s rhetoric has been even more gratuitously provocative. Over the weekend, Attorney General Pamela Bondi continued her practice of turning the Justice Department into a political messaging shop for the White House, ripping Boasberg for having “supported Tren de Aragua terrorists over the safety of Americans.” (I actually think Boasberg was trying to determine whether the detainees have due process rights to challenge their deportation under the Alien Enemy Act, which they very likely do.) And President Trump’s border “czar,” Tom Homan, reportedly stated in an interview today, “We’re not stopping. . . . I don’t care what the judges think, I don’t care what the Left thinks. We’re coming.”

It should go without saying that, at the Justice Department, the rule of the road is that, in the absence of a true emergency, the government complies with judicial orders, even if the orders are patently lawless, until it can get them reversed — either by the issuing judge or a higher court. It’s all right to complain bitterly about court orders, but they are not to be ignored, much less knowingly flouted.

And in this instance, it is anything but clear that Boasberg’s order was lawless. (There are certainly questions whether detainees in Texas should have brought their petition to a judge in Washington — obvious forum shopping. But there’s no question that some federal court, probably in Texas, was the proper court for the petition that was filed.) That, no doubt, explains the administration’s dizzying assertions over the weekend both that it did not defy Boasberg’s order and that he lacked jurisdiction to issue such an order — coupled with today’s position that the administration does not care to discuss the order.

My conclusion: The fight with an Obama-appointed judge over Venezuelan gang bangers it is portraying as terrorists is one the administration covets. The deportation gambit was sprung on a Saturday, when the administration had to know there would be emergency applications by the detainees but that the court would have difficulty convening a hearing — even as the administration moved forward with the deportation flights.

Politically, the president knows that even if there are legal problems with his Alien Enemy Act theory, a large percentage of the country is outraged by the collapse of border security, rampant illegal immigration, and gang crime. That’s why Trump was elected, and he knows it. The administration reasonably thus calculates that the deportations will not only be popular but will make the president more popular if they are portrayed as yet another instance of Democrats and Democrat-appointed judges siding with alien lawbreakers over Americans.

Usually, the government tries to prevent fireworks in its dealings with the federal courts — to say nothing of dealings with the chief judge of an important tribunal (with jurisdiction over government agencies and actions in Washington) before which some of the Justice Department’s most significant cases are adjudicated.

Here, the government seems to be intentionally instigating fireworks. That seems like a terrible legal strategy, but it may be winning politics . . . at least for a little while.