A federal judge in Washington threatened Wednesday to open a high-stakes contempt investigation into whether the Trump administration violated an order he issued last month directing officials to stop planes of Venezuelan migrants from being sent to El Salvador.

In a 46-page ruling, Judge James E. Boasberg said he would begin contempt proceedings against the administration unless the White House did what it has failed to do for more than a month: give scores of Venezuelan men deported to El Salvador under the expansive authority of a wartime law called the Alien Enemies Act a chance to challenge their removal.

“The court does not reach such conclusions lightly or hastily,” wrote Boasberg, who sits as the chief judge in U.S. District Court in Washington. “Indeed, it has given defendants ample opportunity to explain their actions. None of their responses has been satisfactory.”Boasberg’s threat of contempt proceedings, coupled with another federal judge’s move Tuesday to open a similar inquiry in a separate deportation case, represented a remarkable attempt by jurists to hold the White House accountable for its apparent willingness to flout court orders.

The twin decisions also showed that judges remain willing to push back against the administration’s broader inclination to probe the traditional, but increasingly fragile, balance of power between the executive and judicial branches. Should administration officials slow-walk his efforts, Boasberg warned that he could make a criminal referral to the Justice Department or even appoint an outside prosecutor.

Maryland ruling

Boasberg’s move came one day after Judge Paula Xinis said at a hearing in U.S. District Court in Maryland that she would begin her own accelerated investigation into whether the White House had violated a ruling by the Supreme Court.

In that case, Xinis ordered the administration within the next two weeks to answer questions — both in writing and in depositions — about why it had so far apparently failed to comply with directions from the Supreme Court to “facilitate” the release of a Maryland man, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, from the same Salvadoran prison to which the Venezuelan migrants had been sent.

Shortly after Boasberg’s order was handed down, the White House said it planned to appeal.

“The President is 100% committed to ensuring that terrorists and criminal illegal migrants are no longer a threat to Americans and their communities across the country,” Steven Cheung, President Donald Trump’s spokesperson, said on social media.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which filed suit on behalf of the Venezuelan men, celebrated the decision.

“Judge Boasberg is correctly focused on the return of individuals sent to a brutal Salvadoran prison without any process whatsoever, and that also remains our concern,” said Lee Gelernt, the ACLU’s lead lawyer in the case.

Judge lays out steps

In his opinion, Boasberg enumerated reasons he believed there was “probable cause” that the administration had in fact violated his order. But even more remarkably, he laid out a road map for what could happen next.

He said that if the White House did not come up with some way of giving the Venezuelans an opportunity to contest their deportations, he would order sworn declarations from Trump officials in an effort to determine who in the administration was responsible for disobeying his instructions.

If that failed to turn up the culprit, Boasberg said he would then require depositions from officials or hold “hearings with live witness testimony under oath.”

If that technique was unsuccessful, too, Boasberg said he would refer the case to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution.

And given the unlikelihood that the department under Trump’s control would bring charges, Boasberg said he would avail himself of one final gambit: using a special provision of criminal contempt law that permits him, as the judge overseeing the matter, to appoint a lawyer from outside the department to prosecute the contempt.

This detailed blueprint suggested that Boasberg’s anger at the administration — and his desire to hold its feet to the fire — had been building for weeks.

How the case began

All of it started with an emergency Zoom hearing March 15 at which the judge told lawyers for the Justice Department to alert the administration that any deportation flights headed to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act needed to be halted at once and that any planes that were already in the air should turn around.

That, however, never happened, leaving nearly 140 Venezuelans, accused by the administration of being members of violent street gang Tren de Aragua, in the custody of jailers at a notorious prison known as CECOT.

Over the next several days, the Justice Department, acting on the White House’s behalf, repeatedly stonewalled Boasberg’s attempts to figure out if someone in the administration had willfully ignored his directives.

First, Justice Department lawyers tried at the last minute to cancel a follow-up hearing where they were told to be prepared to explain what had happened. That same day, department lawyers also took the highly unusual step of asking the federal appeals court that sits over Boasberg to remove him from the case.

When Boasberg remained on the case and refused to delay the hearing, Justice Department lawyers spent much of it dodging his questions and offering an array of excuses.

The lawyers claimed, among other things, that once the planes had left U.S. airspace the judge no longer had the authority to stop them. They also argued that the ruling they paid attention to was Boasberg’s written order, which was filed on the docket almost an hour after his oral order in the courtroom — a position that he scoffed at.

“That’s a heckuva stretch,” he said of the government’s attempts to differentiate between the two.

Supreme Court ruling

In yet another unusual twist in the case, the Supreme Court, in a narrow ruling this month, struck down Boasberg’s order, essentially on procedural grounds.

The justices ruled that while migrants deported by the White House under the Alien Enemies Act should have the opportunity to challenge their removal, those challenges had to be filed in the places where they were being detained. And the migrants covered by Boasberg’s initial ruling were being held in Texas, not Washington.

In his opinion Wednesday, Boasberg said it was legally permissible to move forward with contempt proceedings even though the underlying order had been vacated.

The Supreme Court’s decision, he wrote, “does not excuse the government’s violation,” adding, “It is a foundational legal precept that every judicial order ‘must be obeyed’ — no matter how ‘erroneous’ it ‘may be’ — until a court reverses it.”

On Wednesday night, following a path laid out by Boasberg, lawyers for the Venezuelan men said they intended to amend their original lawsuit, seeking to allow the scores of migrants who are now in custody in El Salvador to challenge their deportations retroactively.

In another effort to broaden their case, the lawyers asked Boasberg to force the government to give anyone in the United States who might face deportation under the Alien Enemies Act 30 days’ notice before seeking to invoke the statute, to allow them to challenge the order.