Attorney General Pam Bondi and other DOJ officials are asking a federal judge to pause a deadline on providing more information on the deportation flights.
President Donald Trump will continue his mass deportations of illegal immigrants under the Alien Enemies Act, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on March 19.
This comes amid an ongoing legal battle between the Justice Department and a federal judge who ordered the flights to cease this past week.
“Americans can absolutely expect to see the continuation of the mass deportation campaign,” Leavitt said during a briefing at the White House on Wednesday. “We have judges who are acting as partisan activists from the bench. … We will continue to comply with these court orders [and] we will continue to fight these battles in court.”
Leavitt also said there are no new flights slated yet.
Trump signed a proclamation on March 15, invoking a 227-year-old law known as the Alien Enemies Act to hasten the deportations of alleged members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.
After a group of anonymous Venezuelan nationals sued the administration in anticipation of Trump’s proclamation, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg ordered the deportations to cease at 7:25 p.m. ET on March 15.
The White House moved forward with the flights, and
On March 16, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that the administration had sent more than 250 Venezuelans accused of being members of the Tren de Aragua gang to a prison in El Salvador.
Boasberg then ordered the administration to provide additional information on its deportation plans. This included sworn declarations of the government’s estimate of how many individuals subject to Trump’s proclamation were still in the country and confirmation that no individuals were removed after the judge issued his order on Saturday evening.
Boasberg gave the administration until noon on Wednesday to provide the information under seal.
On March 18, U.S. officials said in sworn statements that they did not violate Boasberg’s order, saying that the Venezuelans who left on a flight after 7:25 p.m. on March 15 were deported for other reasons.
Robert Cerna, an acting field office director for the Enforcement and Removal Operations office of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), said two planes carrying Venezuelans exited U.S. airspace and embarked to El Salvador before Boasberg’s order.
Cerna said a third flight departed after the order was released but consisted of passengers with removal orders from immigration judges, and none was removed “solely on the basis of the Proclamation at issue.”
On Wednesday, the Justice Department filed a last-minute bid to avoid providing Boasberg with additional information on the flights, suggesting that his request could impact national security.
“The pending questions are grave encroachments on core aspects of absolute and unreviewable Executive Branch authority relating to national security, foreign relations, and foreign policy,” the Justice Department wrote in the filing.
Attorney General Pam Bondi and other top Justice Department officials argued that the orders imply that the judiciary sees itself as “superior to the Executive Branch, particularly on non-legal matters involving foreign affairs and national security.”
“The two branches are coequal, and the Court’s continued intrusions into the prerogatives of the Executive Branch, especially on a non-legal and factually irrelevant matter, should end,” the filing states.
“Continuing to beat a dead horse solely for the sake of prying from the Government legally immaterial facts and wholly within a sphere of core functions of the Executive Branch is both purposeless and frustrating to the consideration of the actual legal issues at stake in this case,” the Justice Department added.
The officials asked Boasberg to pause his noon deadline in part to give them time to decide whether to “invoke the state secrets privilege” to avoid complying with the judge’s request.
The White House said on Sunday that deportation flights carrying alleged members of the Tren de Aragua criminal gang did not conflict with the judge’s order that blocked such actions because the ruling was issued after the flights had already left U.S. territory.
The plaintiffs suing the administration alleged that the government’s treating Boasberg’s order as only applying to illegal immigrants still within the United States was “a blatant violation of the Court’s Order.”
They also referred to flight tracking data showing several flights that landed after Boasberg’s order, one of them in El Salvador.
Sam Dorman, Zachary Stieber, and Aldgra Fredly contributed to this request.