Last year, the Trump administration sent over 100 Venezuelan migrants to an infamous prison labor camp in El Salvador without giving them any opportunity to challenge the legal basis of their removal, in direct violation of a court order that barred the government from doing so. On Thursday, federal district court Judge James Boasberg issued a new directive, ordering the Trump administration to “facilitate the return” of any of those migrants who are now in “third countries” (meaning neither the U.S. nor Venezuela) who want to come back to the United States and contest the legal grounds for their deportation.
Boasberg emphasized that he didn’t reach his conclusions lightly, and had even offered the Trump administration the opportunity to propose alternative steps to ensure that migrants receive the legal hearings to which the Constitution entitles them. But after the government “essentially told the court to pound sand,” he said, he concluded that returning the migrants would be “more productive.”
Boasberg, who in 2023 became the chief judge of the federal district court for Washington, D.C., has been a frequent target of political attacks by the White House and its allies, up to and including calls to remove him from the bench. “This judge, like many of the Crooked Judges I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED!!!” posted President Donald Trump on social media in March 2025, in response to some of Boasberg’s earlier orders in the Venezuelan migrants case. That same day, two dozen House Republicans cosponsored articles of impeachment against Boasberg, claiming that he violated his judicial oath of office by prioritizing “political gain” over his “duty of impartiality.” And last month, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing exploring impeachment as a tool for holding “rogue judges” like Boasberg accountable.
Chief Justice John Roberts put out a rare statement in March 2025 noting that impeachment is “not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision,” but the Trump administration doesn’t appear to have given Roberts’ words any meaningful consideration. On Tuesday, for instance, Bloomberg reported that senior officials in the Justice Department asked the nation’s federal prosecutors to provide examples of “judicial activism from rogue judges” that would allow the administration to make impeachment referrals to Congress. On Wednesday, at a congressional hearing, Attorney General Pam Bondi lambasted “liberal activist judges” for their “coordinated judicial opposition.” To USA Today, White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said it was “appalling” that “clearly biased lower courts” were trying to “push their unlawful policy agendas” rather than let Trump implement “the agenda he was elected on.”
Increasingly, the administration is characterizing judges who rule against them as partisan activists making rulings based on bias and spite rather than impartiality and respect for the law. There is a simpler, less conspiratorial explanation. Judges across the political spectrum keep condemning the Trump administration as lawless because the Trump administration keeps brazenly breaking the law.
In immigration-related cases alone, hundreds of federal judges, who were appointed by every president since Ronald Reagan, have issued thousands of orders against the Trump administration. At least 44 of the judges to rule against the administration in mass-detention cases were appointed by Trump himself. On Thursday, for example, Judge Nancy Brasel, whom Trump appointed to Minnesota’s federal district court in 2018, granted a temporary restraining order blocking the administration from whisking noncitizen detainees out of state before they can even talk to a lawyer. “The Constitution does not permit the government to arrest thousands of individuals and then disregard their constitutional rights because it would be too challenging to honor those rights,” said Brasel.
Another Republican-appointed judge issued another ruling against the Trump administration on Thursday, too, arising out of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s attempt to censure Arizona Democratic Senator Mark Kelly, a retired naval officer. In November 2025, Kelly appeared in a video reminding members of the military that they have an obligation to disobey illegal orders, so Hegseth tried to reduce his retirement rank and pay. Federal district court Judge Richard Leon, who was appointed by President George W. Bush in 2002, determined that Hegseth’s actions were making veterans afraid to exercise their First Amendment rights, and concluded that was “a troubling development in a free country!” Leon also stated that “our retired veterans deserve more respect from their Government, and our Constitution demands they receive it!” (The order includes 14 exclamation points, including one exasperated “Horsefeathers!”)
The most stunning federal judicial rebuke of the Trump administration to date is likely the recent order directing the government to release Liam Ramos, the five-year-old boy in a bunny hat whom the Trump administration shipped from Minneapolis to a detention center in Dilley, Texas. Two weeks ago, federal district court judge Fred Biery chastised the administration for “traumatizing children” and criticized its indulgence of a “perfidious lust for unbridled power and the imposition of cruelty.” Biery, who was appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1994, also cited two Bible verses, Matthew 19:14 and John 11:35. They are, respectively, “Jesus said, ‘Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these,’” and “Jesus wept.”
Longtime federal judges are literally declaring that the Trump administration is an affront to the laws of man and God alike. In the administration’s imagination, such rulings are evidence of a biased judiciary. In reality, what the administration perceives as open hostility from judges is an objective response to open authoritarianism.
