Karoline Leavitt Redefines What Counts as a Judge’s Order

The Trump administration continues to move the goalposts as backlash mounts against its recent deportation actions. 

On Friday, the president invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport more than 200 Venezuelan immigrants, alleging they were all gang members. The following day, a federal judge ordered any planes departing the U.S. on these grounds to return to the country. Still, two planes with Venezuelans were deported to El Salvador. The Trump administration claimed that while the judge sent a verbal order before takeoff, the written order came too late, as the order was electronically filed 45 minutes after the planes left U.S. airspace.

Trump press secretary Karoline Leavitt defended this nonsense position at a press conference on Monday. “Does the White House feel the need to reply with a verbal order from this judge?” a reporter asked Leavitt.

“As I said, all of the planes subject to the written order of this judge departed U.S. soil, U.S. territory before the judge’s written order.”

“But what about the verbal order, which of course carries the same legal weight as a written order, and said for the planes to turn around if they were in the air?”

“Well there’s actually questions about whether a verbal order carries the same weight as a … written order, and our lawyers are determined to ask and answer those questions in court.”  

The White House is offering up petty, measly excuses to justify its complete rebuke of the checks and balances system.

Republican lawmakers are going after the judicial branch, claiming that the legal appointees are attempting to usurp Donald Trump’s power for merely ruling against the president’s agenda.

“These far-left Resistance™ district court judges are under the impression they were elected president,” Senator Tom Cotton posted on X Monday. “The idea of ordering the President to turn around a plane filled with violent criminal illegal aliens is outrageous.”

Fox News also pitched in on the effort to condemn the judge, broadcasting a photo of James Boasberg, the chief judge of the Washington, D.C., District Court, to its millions of viewers.

The Trump administration ignored a judge’s order to turn around two planes carrying hundreds of alleged Venezuelan gang members on Saturday. In a verbal order, Boasberg demanded that the government cancel the flights immediately.

“You shall inform your clients of this immediately. Any plane containing these folks that is going to take off or is in the air needs to be returned to the United States,” Boasberg said during a hearing. “However that’s accomplished, turning around the plane, or not embarking anyone on the plane.… This is something that you need to make sure is complied with immediately.”

Regardless, the planes did not turn around.

Trump had invoked a Japanese internment-era wartime policy—the Alien Enemies Act—early Saturday to deport noncitizens he believed to be a part of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. Five of the men sued the Trump administration in response, attempting to prevent their “imminent removal.”

But hours later, when the emergency court hearing had taken a brief pause, the planes were skybound. Once Boasberg’s directive was received, Trump officials made the calculated decision to keep the planes en route to Honduras, alleging “operational” and “national security” reasons for their continued flight while claiming that the judge’s order was out of bounds since the planes had supposedly passed over international waters by the time the verbal order was given.

The following day, Trump had his explanation for the blatant infraction, claiming that the nation’s immigration constituted an “invasion” while describing the current era as a “time of war.”

“These are criminals, many, many criminals,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One. “Murderers, drug dealers at the highest level, drug lords. People from mental institutions.”

Donald Trump chose to threaten Iran Monday morning, warning the country the “consequences” will be “dire” if the Houthi movement in Yemen continues its attacks.

“Let nobody be fooled! The hundreds of attacks being made by Houthi, the sinister mobsters and thugs based in Yemen, who are hated by the Yemeni people, all emanate from, and are created by, IRAN. Any further attack or retaliation by the ‘Houthis’ will be met with great force, and there is no guarantee that that force will stop there,” Trump said in a long, rambling post on Truth Social.

“Every shot fired by the Houthis will be looked upon, from this point forward, as being a shot fired from the weapons and leadership of IRAN, and IRAN will be held responsible, and suffer the consequences, and those consequences will be dire!” Trump’s post continued, with the president uncharacteristically signing off with “DONALD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.”

Trump’s saber-rattling comes after he ordered airstrikes on Houthi areas on Saturday following the Houthi movement’s announcement that it would attack Israeli-linked ships passing through the Red Sea on their way to the Suez Canal. That threat came in response to Israel blocking all aid from entering Gaza for more than two weeks.

The Trump administration said that the airstrikes killed multiple Houthi leaders. The deputy head of the Houthi media office, Nasruddin Amer, said that they would retaliate against the U.S. and continue their support for Gaza.

“Our position is clear and our demand is simple: lifting the siege on Gaza and saving the people of Gaza from starvation,” Amer posted on social media.

Trump’s threats toward Iran come two weeks after he sent a letter to Iran’s leaders offering a path to restart negotiations over the Iranian nuclear program. Trump infamously abandoned the 2018 landmark nuclear deal reached between the U.S., Iran, and five other countries during his first term. Monday’s threats will undermine any prospect for talks between the U.S. and Iran, if Trump was even serious about them in the first place, and further increase tensions in an already unstable Middle East.

Trump’s border czar proudly proclaimed that their administration could care less about what federal judges have to say about their hard-line immigration policies. 

“I wake up every morning loving my job because I work for the greatest president in the history of my life, and we’re gon’ make this country safe again. I’m proud to be a part of this administration,” Tom Homan raved on Fox News Monday morning. “We’re not stopping. I don’t care what the judges think, I don’t care what the left thinks, we’re comin.’” 

This comes after a weekend of the Trump administration ignoring court orders to deport immigrants in two high-profile cases. On Saturday, a federal judge ordered two planes of Venezuelans  being deported to El Salvador to return to the United States. The Trump administration, however, claimed the order came too late and the plane was already out of U.S. airspace, citing the time the order was filed in the court’s electronic docket instead of the verbal order, which came 45 minutes earlier. On Friday, Brown University doctor and legal visa holder Rasha Alawieh was also deported, despite a court order blocking her removal from the country.

Both cases follow the kidnapping of green card holder and pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil and, along with Homan’s statement, finally confirm what many already knew: The “rule of law” has no power over this administration.

Several nuclear scientists, bomb engineers, and safety experts critical to national security were among the cuts made by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.

The New York Times reports that more than 130 members of a top secret agency, the National Nuclear Security Agency, either took the Trump administration’s deferred resignation “buyout” or were fired in the past six weeks, putting an effort to upgrade the American nuclear arsenal at risk.

These cuts include at least 27 engineers, 12 program or project managers, 13 program or project analysts, five scientists or physicists, six budget analysts or accountants, as well as multiple attorneys, safety experts, and compliance officers. The job losses are coming despite the NNSA being in its busiest period since the Cold War, according to the Times.

The agency is modernizing the country’s nuclear stockpile, comprising 3,748 bombs and warheads, an effort costing $20 billion a year to arm new land-based missiles, bomber jets, and nuclear submarines. The agency had built itself up to 2,000 workers in January, still short of what it said it needed, but the new cuts undo those gains and undermine the agency’s attempt to build up its staff to handle the workload.

The NNSA is part of the Department of Energy and usually stays out of the news. But it goes to show that even those most critical agencies have been subject to the wanton, haphazard budget cuts championed by Musk and the GOP in the supposed quest to find waste, fraud, and abuse. Many people who left the agency held top-secret security clearances, and it will be tough to train replacements.

“Who’s going to teach those new people?” one anonymous senior official who took the buyout told the Times. “Who’s going to mentor them, and who’s going to bring them up to speed?”