USA TODAY in El Salvador: Van Hollen denied access to Abrego Garcia
USA TODAY reporter Will Carless reports from El Salvador where Sen. Chris Van Hollen says he was denied requests to see Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
WASHINGTON, April 16 (Reuters) – The U.S. judge threatening to begin criminal contempt action against Donald Trump’s administration has for years handled high-stakes cases involving sensitive security or political issues, sometimes ruling in the Republican president’s favor.
U.S. District Judge James “Jeb” Boasberg, an appointee of Democratic former President Barack Obama, is central to an escalating White House conflict with a judiciary shepherding dozens of cases challenging the administration’s actions.
On Wednesday, Boasberg found the administration showed a “willful disregard” of his March 15 order temporarily blocking its use of a 1789 wartime powers law to deport alleged members of a Venezuelan gang.
The U.S. Supreme Court on April 7 said Trump could use the law but any deportation was subject to judicial review.
Trump called for the judge’s impeachment last month, prompting a rare rebuke from U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts. Trump’s Justice Department accused Boasberg of employing “highly unusual and improper procedures” in the case.
Boasberg, chief judge of the federal District Court in Washington, D.C., is known for his booming baritone voice and for peppering legal opinions with colorful language and pop culture references.
He cited a Star Trek reference to the Borg catchphrase “Resistance is futile” in an opinion he wrote that dismissed a lawsuit a Trump aide brought against the congressional committee that investigated the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
It is one of several Trump-related cases he has handled in the past. The U.S. Senate confirmed Boasberg’s appointment in 2011 on a 96-0 vote. He was initially nominated as a local judge in Washington, D.C., by Republican President George W. Bush.
In 2023, he ordered Trump’s former Vice President Mike Pence to testify to a grand jury about Trump’s attempts to pressure him to thwart certification of Trump’s 2020 election defeat. Pence’s testimony formed a central part of the since-dismissed criminal case that accused Trump of trying to reverse his election loss.
In 2017, during Trump’s first term, Boasberg denied an effort by an advocacy organization to obtain Trump’s tax records, which Trump, a businessman-turned-politician, had at that point successfully kept private.
Boasberg also dealt with issues surrounding Trump’s Democratic rival Hillary Clinton’s emails during her tenure as Secretary of State, an issue that dogged her 2016 campaign, ruling in some instances in favor of a conservative group that sought to make them public.
Boasberg is overseeing a landmark antitrust trial pitting the U.S. Federal Trade Commission against Facebook owner Meta Platforms META.O. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been testifying in his courtroom this week.
The judge has also served on a U.S. court that handles secret government surveillance requests aimed at suspected foreign intelligence threats within the United States. He ended his term as presiding judge on that court in 2021.
In 2012, he dismissed a lawsuit seeking to compel the Obama administration to release pictures and videos of the U.S. military operation that killed al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in Pakistan.
Prior to his role as a judge, Boasberg served as a local prosecutor in Washington D.C., where he specialized in prosecuting murder cases.
Boasberg played a prosecutor in 2018 in a play written by former Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy that depicts a criminal trial of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.”
Boasberg told a Trump administration lawyer during a tense hearing in the deportation case that he advises his law clerks that their most valuable assets are their reputation and their credibility.
“I would just ask you to make sure that your team maintains that lesson,” Boasberg said.
(Reporting by Andrew Goudsward; Additional reporting by Ted Hesson and Tom Hals; Editing by Howard Goller)