A Tale of Two Jurists in the Trump Era
Last month, James Boasberg, a seasoned federal judge, and Emil Bove III, lawyer for the Ministry of Justice, became sheets in a parable on the rule of law during the second term of Donald Trump. On July 28, the Ministry of Justice announced a fault complaint against Boasberg, which he accused of sheltering personal parts against the president. The next day, Bove, which Trump had appointed to judge the third court of appeal, was confirmed by the Republicans in the Senate. Boasberg had “undermined the integrity of the judiciary, and we will not defend this,” said Pam Bondi, Trump’s attorney general, by, on the other hand, Bove, “she said,” will be an outstanding judge “.
Beyond the fact that they are both former prosecutors, and bald, the two men seem to have very few common points. Boasberg, who was at the beginning of sixties, was appointed to judge by George W. Bush and Barack Obama. The Senate confirmed it to its current post by a vote from eighty-six to zero. In 2014, John Roberts, the chief judge of the Supreme Court, appointed Boasberg to a seven -year term on the foreign intelligence court, giving him a high -level security authorization. “You knew that when you went to court with him, that he was going to respect the rules,” a former lawyer of the Ministry of Justice told CNN. “He was very predictable because he followed the law.”
Bove, who is forty-four years old, worked as an American deputy prosecutor in the South New York district from 2012 to 2021, but his main competence holder came two years later: after Donald Trump faced thirty-four falsification heads of commercial files in Manhattan, Bove joined his criminal-defense team. (Trump was convicted of all the counts and called on this result.) When Trump reduced the White House, Bove was rewarded by a job in the foreground of the Ministry of Justice, where he immediately distinguished himself as an executor. Last winter, when three prosecutors of the South New York district resigned from the successful pressure from the administration to reject a corruption case against Mayor Eric Adams, Bove was at the center of the controversy. The Ministry of Justice had ordered prosecutors to suppress the accusations, obviously so that ADAMS is able to apply the immigration policies of the administration. According to one of the prosecutors, Bove reprimanded them for taking notes at a key meeting, at the end of which he “led the collection of these notes”. (Bove denies any quid -quo agreement, saying that he had ended Adams’ pursuit because he was politically motivated – Adads argues that he had no reprehensible acts – and that he has restricted notes to prevent leaks.)
The high contrast in which Boasberg and Bove are currently being held is the direct result of a case which, by a timing and circumstance accident, has linked their political destiny together. Friday, March 14, Trump signed a proclamation invoking the law on extraterrestrial enemies of 1798 to authorize the withdrawal, in secret, of more than two hundred Venezuelan men in a maximum security prison in El Salvador. As a federal policy, it was a radical decision. With poor quality evidence, whose men were authorized to challenge, the government accused them of belonging to a Venezuelan gang called Tren of Aragua. Based on what immigration and customs officials told them during their detention, men thought they were expelled in Venezuela. The majority of them had not committed any crime, and some had in fact legal status in the United States among those who did not do so, many had matters pending before the immigration judges.
Shortly before Trump signed the proclamation, a group of MJ lawyers met to discuss what would happen if a judge sent an order to arrest the moves. One of them was Bove. Another was Erez Reuveni, a veteran government’s litigant, freshly promoted to the position of deputy director of the Office of Immigration. According to Reveni, who then filed a complaint of denunciation, Bove told lawyers that Trump signed the proclamation, one or more planes would be triggered for El Salvador this weekend, “no matter what”, and he continued to say that if a judge tried to ban flights, the ministry “would need to say that the courts.” (Bove denies this.)
In the hours following the proclamation, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a complaint in the name of five Venezuelan men in federal police custody to block the moves of moving carried out under the law on extraterrestrial enemies. On the morning of March 15, around the age of eight, Boasberg learned that he had been assigned to the case at random. When he “contacted the search for a government lawyer”, wrote Boasberg, in a later opinion, he did not receive an answer. In the meantime, the complainants’ lawyers reported that at least one of their customers was sitting on a plane that could take off at any time. Boasberg made a temporary ban prescription, just before 10 AM He said he had to “freeze the status quo until an audience could be held”.
The hearing started at five o’clock that evening, just over an hour after the publication of Trump’s proclamation. Government lawyers were categorical according to which Boasberg should not certify a wider class – according to the five complainants – for protection against withdrawal under the Act to Extraterrestrial Enemies. When Boasberg asked if flights could leave “in the twenty-four or forty-eight-eight hours,” attracted Ensign, the government’s lawyer replied: “I do not know the answer to this question.” According to Reveni, however, Ensign attended the meeting the day before in which Bove said that the return flights would leave during the weekend.
Finally, Boasberg called a forty -minute adjournment and asked Ensign to obtain more information from the Ministry of Homeland Security. Meanwhile, two planes, each carrying about eighty detained, left Texas for Honduras. They were in transit when the hearing met, but Ensign said that he had learned nothing more. About six-five, Boasberg has published a verbal order preventing the government from withdrawing anyone under the auspices of the law on extraterrestrial enemies. “This is something you need to make sure you are immediately respected,” he said.
Reundi had listened to the live flow from the hearing. He immediately sent several emails to managers of the Departments of Internal Security and the establishment of the State, explicitly, which Boasberg had said. “Sorry for all emails,” he wrote in one, at 6:48 am PM “The judge specifically ordered us not to withdraw anyone in the classroom and to return anyone in the air.” Reveni was ignored, just like Boasberg. At 7:36 am PMA third plane left Texas for Honduras. Between eleven thirty-nine and twelve hours of nine that evening, the three flights then stole from Honduras to Salvador, transporting more than two hundred Venezuelans, a group of Salvadoran and a Nicaraguan.
On March 28, the Trump administration made an emergency request to the Supreme Court, asking it to raise the injunction of Boasberg. Ten days later, by a vote of 5 to 4 years, the judges judged that the complainants in the case, known as JGG c. Trump, had chosen both the bad place and the bad principle on which complaints. Rather than claiming a violation of the administrative procedure before a district court in Washington, as the complainants had done, the court should have deposited petitions for Habeas Corpus in Texas, where the men were detained before their withdrawal. Nevertheless, the decision was unequivocal on one point: anyone owned under the law on extraterrestrial enemies had to be notified before being removed and an opportunity to challenge their expulsion.
The result indeed enabled the Boasberg injunction against the moves on March 15, but it strengthened certain aspects of its decision. “The court actually declared that the Constitution categorically prohibits the government from doing exactly what it had done this Saturday, when it secretly charged people on planes, has kept many of them in the ignorance of their destination and ran to have moved them before being able to invoke their treatment rights due,” Basberg wrote in an opinion he issued on April 16. In this opinion, he also found that there was a “probable cause” to believe that the Trump administration could be held in the court for the court for having ignored its initial.
At that time, the government had organized two other planes to transport the detainees to the same Salvadorian prison. The Trump administration no longer invoked the law on extraterrestrial enemies, but it did not share the names of the detainees; There was no official file. On March 31, the State Department announced that it had sent seventeen additional migrants to the prison. Ten were salvadoran, the other Venezuelans. Two weeks later, Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, posted on X: “Last night, 10 other criminals of foreign terrorist organizations MS-13 and Tren of Aragua arrived in Salvador.”
When Boasberg wrote that there was a “probable cause” to believe that the government had ignored its orders, it actually launched a more sustained investigation into what had happened on March 15. But this was not the only case in which Bove seemed to be in contradiction with the instructions of a judge. The Ministry of Internal Security planned to expel people apprehended on American soil to third countries, often without adequate procedures or legal justifications. Several of these cases caused a separate legal action before a different judge as to whether the government, in accordance with the convention against torture, had correctly determined that migrants would not be tortured after their withdrawal. After this judge temporarily blocked these moves, Rebeni has raised questions within the Ministry of Justice to find out if the administration was unaware once again, an injunction of a judge. On April 1, according to Reveni, he received an appeal from an interim deputy prosecutor who told him that “Bove was very unhappy that Mr. Reveni contacted advice in various agencies to determine if the DoJ had violated a court order.” Reundi was invited to stop sending emails and restricting his future communications to telephone calls.
