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A federal judge is investigating whether Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem Flights carrying migrants should face contempt charges El Salvador Said on Monday that he wants to hear from a whistleblower and the top Justice Department Officer.
U.S. District Judge James Boasberg ordered the government to make Deputy Assistant Attorney General Drew Ensign available to testify on December 16. Boasberg wants to hold a hearing a day before fired Justice Department lawyer Erez Reuven.
The deposition order escalates the extraordinary confrontation between the judicial and executive branches.
In March, Boasberg ordered the administration to turn back two planes carrying Venezuelan migrants.
Instead, the planes landed in El Salvador hours later, touching off a contempt investigation. Boasberg is trying to determine whether the administration willfully ignored his order and whether he should be referred to trial on contempt charges.
Reuvenni has filed a whistleblower complaint accusing a Justice Department official of suggesting trump The administration may have to ignore court orders as it prepares to deport Venezuelan migrants it accuses of being gang members. The administration has termed the allegations as false.
The Justice Department said Ensign informed the Department of Homeland Security of Boasberg’s verbal order and subsequent written order.
In a written declaration submitted to the court on Friday, Noem said she decided not to return the planes to the US after receiving “privileged legal advice” from the acting general counsel of the Department of Homeland Security and “through them from senior leadership at the Justice Department.”
Boasberg called Noem’s announcement “cursory.”
“Since this declaration does not provide the court with sufficient information to determine whether his decision was a willful violation of a court order, the court cannot at this time find probable cause that his actions constituted criminal contempt,” the judge wrote in Monday’s order.
The administration has said it did not violate Boasberg’s order. Government lawyers said in a court filing in November that the judge’s direction to return the planes was given verbally to the court, but was not included in his written order.
That order barred the administration from “removing any individual plaintiff from the United States for 14 days,” he said, but said nothing about preemptive air flights.
Justice Department lawyers said in a court filing that both planes had already left US territory and airspace, so the migrants aboard had already been “removed” and were therefore exempt from the court order.
Justice Department lawyers objected to any “live testimony” in a court filing Friday, urging Boasberg to proceed immediately with a criminal contempt referral if he felt his order was “sufficiently clear in imposing the obligation to prevent the transfer of custody for detainees who have already been removed from the United States.”