Evidence challenging the Trump admin's immigration moves is now out in the open

The question now is what courts will do to hold the administration accountable for its lawless actions regarding the Alien Enemies Act and other immigration moves.

We have not yet hit the six-month mark of the new Trump administration, but this week has been a rough one for lawyers defending lawless Trump administration policies.

Given that President Donald Trump has sought to continually stretch immigration authorities beyond their breaking points and Justice Department lawyers have tried to defend the administration’s efforts nearly every step of the way, there were bound to be problems.

This week, however, made clear just how significant those problems already are.

First, as Law Dork reported on July 7, a United Nations report was filed in an Alien Enemies Act case in federal court in D.C. that contradicts the State Department’s sworn declaration about the status of people sent to El Salvador’s CECOT prison.

DOJ, citing a declaration from a State Department official, has insisted that El Salvador has the final say regarding the people sent to CECOT. El Salvador, however, has told the UN that “the jurisdiction and legal responsibility for these persons lie exclusively with the competent foreign authorities” — as in, the United States.

Within a day of that filing, U.S. District Judge Stephanie Gallagher — in another case — ordered the Justice Department to explain itself with regards to its foot-dragging in returning Cristian to the U.S., a person who was sent to CECOT despite having been subject to a class-action settlement approved by the court that was supposed to have protected him from deportation.

Gallagher was the first judge to do so. She should not be the last.

That, however, was just the beginning.

On Thursday morning, Senator Dick Durbin released evidence provided by Justice Department whistleblower Erez Reuveni — fired for telling a court the truth in the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case — that backs up the claims made in the astonishing whistleblower disclosure provided by his lawyers in June. (Durbin requested the evidence after the disclosure was submitted.)

The evidence is damning on all fronts, but especially as to the Trump administration’s actions on March 15, 2025, when it attempted to begin carrying out President Donald Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act without a war and without — as was later detailed — as much process as was given to suspected Nazis during World War II.

The messages also specifically and repeatedly provide evidence backing up one of the most explosive claims in the whistleblower disclosure — that Emil Bove, a senior Justice Department official who is a Trump nominee to be a federal appeals court judge, told attendees at a key meeting that DOJ might need to tell the courts “fuck you” if they tried to block Alien Enemies Act-based deportations.

To understand the importance of the messages, let me take you back to Saturday, March 15. This is how it began:

Before noon that day, the federal government knew Chief Judge James Boasberg was going to consider class certification at a 5 p.m. hearing.

When Boasberg began that hearing, none of the three flights at issue that day had yet taken off — and DOJ lawyer Drew Ensign’s claimed lack of knowledge about whether there would be any AEA deportations that weekend led Boasberg to take a recess so that he could find out, as I wrote at the time:

In Thursday’s disclosures, this was the conversation between Reuveni (blue) and a colleague during that hearing.

Then, as the hearing came back at 6 p.m. (“Drew” is Drew Ensign, the DOJ lawyer arguing before Boasberg on March 15.)

At 6:46 p.m., Boasberg acted.

Reuveni acted expeditiously, sending an email amounting to virtually the same thing I posted at the same time to relevant parties across the government.

By 90 minutes later, however, Reuveni knew that flights in the air had landed — and had not turned around. He knew there was trouble.

Reuveni spent the next 16 hours trying to get an answer. The world learned that flights had landed and people were turned over to El Salvador. Questions swirled about what had happened.

In Reuveni’s disclosures, we learned that, on Sunday afternoon, March 16, Yaakov Roth, the acting head of the Civil Division at the time, wrote that the principal associate deputy attorney general — Emil Bove — told Homeland Security overnight that “the deplaning of the flights that had departed US airspace prior the court's minute order was permissible under the law and the court's order.”

Thus, along with the Axios story that day, began the absurd argument from the government that AEA removals under the first two flights were permitted because — as DOJ, in a notice signed by Ensign, attributed to “information from the Department of Homeland Security“ — “some gang members subject to removal under the Proclamation had already been removed from United States territory under the Proclamation before the issuance of this Court’s second order.”

A month later, Boasberg found probable cause that the Trump administration was in contempt when it turned over the people on those flights to El Salvador.

I wrote on March 17 why understanding what happened that weekend matters. Reuveni did the nation a great service by helping further our understanding.

Now, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit has to act. The appeals court has kept Boasberg’s accountability efforts on ice for the past 12 weeks at the Trump administration’s request, with an unjustified and unreasoned “administrative stay” in place since April 18.

As Reuveni’s disclosures make abundantly clear, the appeals court needs to stop stalling and put Boasberg’s contempt proceeding — which never should have been blocked — back in motion.