DOJ says disclosing migrant flight information is 'inappropriate'

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration told a federal judge Tuesday that it should not have to provide information on the timing of flights that carried migrants for deportation, amid an accusation the executive branch defied a court order to halt the planes.

In a three-page filing, the Justice Department said Judge James E. Boasberg of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia has no grounds for requiring the U.S. government to share that information.

“The Government maintains that there is no justification to order the provision of additional information, and that doing so would be inappropriate, because even accepting Plaintiffs’ account of the facts, there was no violation of the Court’s written order (since the relevant flights left U.S. airspace, and so their occupants were ‘removed,’ before the order issued), and the Court’s earlier oral statements were not independently enforceable as injunctions,” the filing says.

In terse language seemingly to underscore the significance of refusing to supply the information, the filing adds: “The Government stands on those arguments.”

The DOJ said that if the judge still wants information, it should be in a declaration given only to the judge and not disclosed to the civil rights groups who filed a lawsuit to stop the deportation flights, “in order to protect sensitive information bearing on foreign relations.”

The American Civil Liberties Union and Democracy Forward filed the lawsuits over the weekend after President Donald Trump invoked a 1798 law known as the Aliens Enemies Act to justify the immediate removals of migrants suspected of members of the Tren de Aragua.

The groups say the removals were done without “any hearing or meaningful review” and regardless of any defenses they have for removal, and that some of the plaintiffs had been targeted by the gang and one was mistakenly labeled as member because of tattoos.

Although the judge issued an order pausing the removals as he considered the litigations, the U.S. government under the law transferred more than 260 migrants to El Salvador, including 137 alleged Tren de Aragua members.

The exact timing of the flights is unclear, but relevant because the groups say the judge’s order occurred as the removals were midflight and the U.S. government had enough time to turn the flights back, but proceeded anyway.

In a court filing Monday, the ACLU said Boasberg at about 6:45 p.m. Saturday had “unambiguously directed the government to turn around any planes carrying individuals being removed” and that the government “has chosen to treat this Court’s Order as applying only to individuals still on U.S. soil or on flights that had yet to clear U.S. airspace as of 7:26pm.”

Boasberg, at a hearing late Monday, had ordered the Justice Department to say how it could share information about the flights.

Robert L. Cerna, a top official with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, submitted as part of the case a sworn declaration on Monday asserting the potential threat Tren de Aragua poses to the United States.

“It was critical to remove TdA members subject to the Proclamation quickly,” Cerna wrote. “These individuals were designated as foreign terrorists. Within Venezuela, TdA was able to grow its numbers from the steady prison population and build its criminal enterprise through the extortion of inmates. Keeping them in ICE custody where they could potentially continue to recruit new TdA members posed a grave risk to ICE personnel; other, nonviolent detainees; and the United States as a whole.”

Cerna wrote that agency personnel “carefully vetted each individual alien to ensure they were in fact” members of the gang and that “numerous individuals removed under the AEA have arrests and convictions in the United States for dangerous offenses.”

While “many of the TdA members removed under the AEA do not have criminal records in the United States,” Cerna wrote, that is because “they have only been in the United States for a short period of time.”

Michael G. Kozak, a top official with the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs at the State Department, also asserted in a separate sworn declaration that the removals of the migrants was necessary, alluding to the agreement the U.S. government made with El Salvador to accept them.

“The foreign policy of the United States would suffer harm if the removal of individuals associate with TdA were prevented, taking into account the significant time and energy expended over several weeks by high-level U.S. government officials and the possibility that foreign interlocutors might change their minds regarding the willingness to accept certain individuals associated with TdA removed or might otherwise seek to leverage this as an ongoing issue,” Kozak wrote.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said during a news conference on Monday that the U.S. government agreed to pay El Salvador $6 million to accept the migrants on the flights removed under Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act.

Trump, before the DOJ filing in the case, wrote in a social media post that Boasberg should be impeached, because voters approved an anti-illegal immigration agenda in the 2024 election.

“This Radical Left Lunatic of a Judge, a troublemaker and agitator who was sadly appointed by Barack Hussein Obama, was not elected President – He didn’t WIN the popular VOTE (by a lot!), he didn’t WIN ALL SEVEN SWING STATES, he didn’t WIN 2,750 to 525 Counties, HE DIDN’T WIN ANYTHING! I WON FOR MANY REASONS, IN AN OVERWHELMING MANDATE, BUT FIGHTING ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION MAY HAVE BEEN THE NUMBER ONE REASON FOR THIS HISTORIC VICTORY,” Trump said.

_____