Washington:
The White House on Wednesday accused judges of “usurping” executive power after a series of rulings against Donald Trump’s administration, including one that blocked the deportation of Venezuelan migrants and drew the president’s ire.
Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt alleged there had been a “concerted effort by the far left” to pick judges who were “clearly acting as partisan activists” to deal with cases involving the Republican’s administration.
“Not only are they usurping the will of the president and the chief executive of our country, but they are undermining the will of the American public,” Leavitt said at a daily briefing.
Leavitt in particular lashed out at District Judge James Boasberg, who ordered the suspension over the weekend of the deportation flights, carried out under an obscure wartime law.
Trump’s administration says it invoked the more than 200-year-old legislation to deport Venezuelan gang members as part of its mass deportation program of undocumented migrants.
“It’s very, very clear that this is an activist judge who is trying to usurp the president’s authority,” Leavitt said, branding the judge also as a “Democrat activist.”
Trump personally called for the judge’s impeachment on Tuesday, saying Boasberg was a “Radical Left Lunatic of a Judge, a troublemaker and agitator who was sadly appointed by Barack Hussein Obama.”
His comments drew a rare public rebuke from Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts.
“For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision,” Roberts said in a statement on Tuesday.
Trump renewed his attacks on Boasberg on his Truth Social network on Wednesday, although he did not repeat his call for impeachment.
“If a President doesn’t have the right to throw murderers, and other criminals, out of our Country because a Radical Left Lunatic Judge wants to assume the role of President, then our Country is in very big trouble, and destined to fail!” he said.
Judges have dealt Trump a number of setbacks in recent days as his administration pursues its wholesale overhaul of the federal government.
A judge on Tuesday ordered an immediate halt to the shutdown of the main US aid agency by tech tycoon Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
On the same day another judge suspended the Trump administration’s ban on transgender people serving in the military, citing the principle of equality.
South African billionaire Musk railed against what he called a “judicial coup” in a series of posts on his social network X.
Trump, the first convicted felon to serve in the White House, has a history of attacking the judges who presided over his civil and criminal cases.
But Trump’s administration now appears bent on a showdown with the judiciary as he asserts extraordinary levels of executive power.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)