Biden-appointed judge who slapped down Trump deportation policy previously rebuked by SCOTUS

A federal judge appointed by former President Joe Biden on Thursday again ruled against the Trump administration’s third-country deportation policy, months after the Supreme Court blocked his earlier decision and rebuked him in a rare follow-up order.

The Supreme Court not only stayed Boston-based Judge Brian Murphy's injunction over the same deportation policy in a 6-3 order last June, but the high court followed up with a second 7-2 order a week later admonishing the judge for flouting its decision. Murphy's latest ruling is also likely to land before the justices, setting up a fresh test of the judge's decisions in the high-stakes case.

Murphy, who was confirmed by the Senate along party lines, had issued a sweeping 81-page decision on Thursday finding that the Department of Homeland Security's process for deporting migrants to third countries (countries that are not specified in the migrants' removal orders) was unlawful because it violated the migrants' due process by not giving them enough time to raise fears that they could be tortured in the country they are sent to.

Murphy's decision came after the judge last year issued a preliminary injunction that also blocked DHS from deporting migrants to third countries under the department's current protocols. The Supreme Court's order in June halted that decision, but, pointing to a technicality, Murphy said that a separate subsequent ruling he made on May 21 specifically addressing six migrants bound for South Sudan was still "in full force and effect" despite the high court's stay.

The judge's move led the Department of Justice to ask the Supreme Court for clarification, and the high court responded by issuing its follow-up 7-2 opinion saying Murphy could not block DHS from deporting the six migrants.

I've been following this story ever since DC Judge Boasberg ordered President Trump to turn the planes around.

Below is a Perplexity AI Pro essay that summarizes my research on this Murphy order.

Judicial Overreach and the Deportation Wars: How Two Federal Judges Fought the President — and Lost the Argument
When the Trump administration invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 on March 15, 2025, and flew 252 alleged members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua to El Salvador's maximum-security CECOT prison, it set in motion one of the most consequential legal confrontations in modern American history. What followed was not merely a dispute over immigration policy. It was a sustained, escalating clash between the executive branch's constitutional authority over foreign affairs and national security, and a federal judiciary that two district court judges appeared determined to weaponize as a check on a president they had prejudged as a threat to constitutional order.
The story of United States District Judge James Boasberg of Washington, D.C., and United States District Judge Brian Murphy of Massachusetts is, at its core, a story about what happens when judges mistake their institutional role for a political mission — and how the facts ultimately exposed the difference.
The Boasberg Chapter: Jurisdiction as a Moving Target
When Boasberg issued a verbal temporary restraining order on the evening of March 15, 2025, as deportation flights were already airborne, the Trump administration proceeded anyway. Boasberg found probable cause for contempt against administration officials, characterizing their conduct as willful defiance of judicial authority. The controversy that followed consumed months of legal proceedings, two Supreme Court interventions, and an extraordinary DC Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that would ultimately describe Boasberg's conduct as an "extraordinary, ongoing confrontation between the Executive and Judicial Branches."
The Supreme Court ruled in June 2025 that Boasberg lacked jurisdiction over the consolidated case entirely, holding that habeas challenges to the deportations must be filed in the districts where the detainees were physically held — not in Washington. It was a complete repudiation of the jurisdictional foundation on which Boasberg had built his entire legal campaign. The DC Circuit followed in August 2025 by vacating Boasberg's contempt proceedings against Trump administration officials, granting a writ of mandamus — an extraordinary remedy reserved for the most egregious cases of judicial overreach — and finding that the government's actions were "clearly and indisputably not criminal."
Most judges, having been rebuked at this level by both a circuit court and the Supreme Court, would have treated the matter as concluded. Boasberg did not.
In a December 22, 2025 opinion, he re-asserted jurisdiction through a novel legal theory: "constructive custody." Because the United States had paid El Salvador $4.7 million to house the detainees, and because DHS Secretary Kristi Noem had publicly described CECOT as "a tool in our toolkit," Boasberg ruled that El Salvador was effectively functioning as a U.S. agent — making the detainees constructively in U.S. custody regardless of their physical location in a foreign prison. By this reasoning, the DC District Court could exercise habeas jurisdiction over any foreign detention facility that received U.S. funding.
The legal problems with this theory are profound. The Supreme Court's precedent in Boumediene v. Bush, which extended habeas rights to Guantanamo detainees, rested explicitly on the fact that the United States exercised complete jurisdiction and control over the naval base, effectively making it U.S. sovereign territory. El Salvador is a sovereign nation. Its prison guards answer to President Nayib Bukele, not President Trump. The $4.7 million was a transaction between governments, not a transfer of sovereignty. Under Boasberg's logic, U.S. district courts would become the de facto overseers of any foreign prison that receives American funding — a proposition no higher court has ever endorsed and one that would fundamentally restructure U.S. foreign relations.
More critically, Boasberg's constructive custody theory directly violated the Act of State Doctrine and the President's long-recognized role as the "sole organ" of U.S. foreign relations. By ordering the State Department to facilitate the return of the deportees from El Salvador, Boasberg was not merely interpreting law — he was dictating diplomatic priorities to a coordinate branch of government on matters the Constitution explicitly reserves to the executive.
What Boasberg Did Not Know — and Could Not Force the President to Disclose
The most significant dimension of the Boasberg saga was almost entirely absent from press coverage. While the judge was ordering the administration to "facilitate the return" of the deportees, the Trump administration was in the middle of a classified diplomatic negotiation with El Salvador and Venezuela — one that would ultimately result in a prisoner swap returning the deportees to Venezuela in exchange for 10 American citizens and 80 Venezuelan political prisoners.
The administration could not disclose this fact to Boasberg. Executive privilege, the deliberative process privilege, and the state secrets privilege — each independently recognized by the Supreme Court — shield from judicial compulsion any classified or sensitive diplomatic planning that remains ongoing. Had the administration been forced to reveal in open court that a prisoner swap was in progress, the disclosure itself could have collapsed the negotiations entirely, producing exactly the outcome the deportees' lawyers claimed to seek: a worse fate for their clients.
The prisoner swap that ultimately occurred validated everything the Trump administration had asserted and could not say. The deportees were returned to their home country. Dozens of Americans were freed. Political prisoners were liberated. The "lawless defiance" of Boasberg's court orders produced a measurably better outcome than compliance ever could have achieved. The judge was demanding transparency that would have made the humanitarian result impossible.
The Maduro Indictment: When the Facts Vindicate the President
The foundational legal question in the Boasberg case — whether Tren de Aragua operated as an instrument of the Venezuelan state, qualifying the gang's deportation as an Alien Enemies Act operation — was answered definitively not by any single administration, but by the sustained, bipartisan institutional record of the United States government itself.
The original indictment against Maduro was filed on March 26, 2020, by the first Trump administration under Attorney General William Barr, charging Maduro with narco-terrorism conspiracy, cocaine importation conspiracy, and weapons offenses in connection with his leadership of the Cartel de los Soles. A superseding indictment quickly followed, expanding the defendant list to 14 Venezuelan officials including Diosdado Cabello, Maduro's Interior Minister and most powerful political ally. At the same time, the State Department placed a $15 million reward on Maduro's head.
What followed is critical to understanding the evidentiary weight of those charges. The Biden administration, which took office in January 2021, did not drop the indictment, did not seek its dismissal, and did not challenge its legal theory. It maintained the charges for four years in their existing form. Then, in one of its final official acts — on January 10, 2025, just ten days before leaving office — the Biden administration raised the reward for Maduro's arrest from $15 million to $25 million, explicitly referencing the narco-terrorism charges as the basis for the escalation. This was not a passive administrative inheritance. It was a deliberate policy choice by a Democratic administration to reaffirm and intensify legal pressure on Maduro under the same charging framework its predecessor had established.
The second Trump administration doubled the reward again to $50 million in August 2025, explicitly connecting Maduro to both the Sinaloa cartel and Tren de Aragua. Then, on January 3, 2026, U.S. forces captured Maduro. The Trump DOJ filed a superseding indictment the same day that significantly expanded the charges — and critically, named Héctor "Niño Guerrero" Rusthenford Guerrero Flores, the alleged leader of Tren de Aragua, as a named co-defendant alongside Maduro. This explicit Maduro-TdA linkage in a sworn charging document is new to the 2026 superseding indictment. It represents the United States government's formal legal position, under oath and subject to probable cause review, that the head of the Venezuelan state personally directed the same gang whose deportation Boasberg's court had ruled lacked sufficient state-actor connection to justify the Alien Enemies Act.
The bipartisan chain of custody matters enormously. Three successive administrations — Trump 1, Biden, and Trump 2 — each affirmatively maintained the narco-terrorism framework against Maduro, with Biden's final-weeks reward increase representing an explicit Democratic endorsement of the charges' validity. Any argument that the prosecution is a partisan fabrication collapses against this record.
In April 2025, caught between these two Trump administrations' legal positions, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a declassified memo concluding that the Maduro regime "probably does not have a policy of cooperating with Tren de Aragua." Boasberg's court relied on this assessment to undermine the AEA factual predicate. But that memo was in direct tension with the Biden administration's own January 2025 reward increase, which had reaffirmed the narco-terrorism charges without reservation just three months earlier. The intelligence memo was an outlier within the government's own record — not a definitive assessment that foreclosed the charges.
Independent corroboration arrived from Chile's judiciary, which formally concluded that the February 2024 kidnapping and assassination of Venezuelan opposition figure Ronald Ojeda in Santiago was ordered by Maduro's Interior Minister Cabello and executed by Tren de Aragua operatives. Chilean prosecutors identified no alternative line of investigation. The gang's leadership had operated openly from Tocorón prison — a facility complete with swimming pools, nightclubs, and armories — functioning as effectively liberated Venezuelan territory with the government's active acquiescence.
The January 2026 DOJ attorneys immediately cited the superseding indictment in the Fifth Circuit to defend the AEA deportations, arguing it proved the Maduro-TdA nexus that courts had demanded for two years. Neither Boasberg nor his defenders have addressed the evidentiary significance of the indictment, the Biden bounty increase, or the Chilean judicial findings.
The Murphy Chapter: Escalation Through Abstraction
While Boasberg was fighting the Venezuela battle, Judge Brian Murphy in Massachusetts was opening a second front against the administration's broader third-country deportation policy. His February 25, 2026 final merits ruling — all 81 pages of it — declared unconstitutional the DHS practice of removing migrants to countries other than their home nations without providing advance notice, access to counsel, and individual hearings.
The South Sudan deportations that precipitated Murphy's ruling present genuinely harder facts than the Venezuela scenario. Eight men — from Cuba, Laos, Mexico, Myanmar, South Sudan, and Vietnam — were deported to South Sudan, a country under a Level 4 State Department "Do Not Travel" advisory, in which the U.S. government had evacuated all non-emergency personnel. Several had been notified only in English, a language some did not speak, hours before departure. The human stakes were real and the procedural concerns legitimate on their face.
But the Supreme Court had already addressed those concerns — twice — and declined to grant the relief Murphy keeps imposing. The Court stayed Murphy's original preliminary injunction in June 2025. When Murphy issued a remedial order attempting to enforce the stayed injunction, the Solicitor General accused him of "unprecedented defiance" of the Supreme Court's own stay order — and the Court again cleared the deportations to proceed in July 2025. The Court's language was pointed: a stayed injunction cannot be enforced through remedial orders as if the stay did not exist.
Murphy's February 2026 ruling is best understood not as a response to new facts — the South Sudan flights occurred months earlier — but as a strategic escalation from the specific to the universal. Having been reversed twice on the specific South Sudan deportations, Murphy reframed the entire DHS third-country removal framework as structurally unconstitutional. He is no longer seeking to protect particular individuals. He is seeking to impose a permanent judicial veto over an entire class of executive immigration decisions. The shift from particular remedy to universal injunction is precisely the maneuver the Supreme Court sought to eliminate in its June 2025 ruling in Trump v. CASA, Inc., which held that district courts lack statutory authority to enjoin federal policies for non-parties.
The governing statutory framework Murphy's ruling must overcome is also formidable. The Immigration and Nationality Act explicitly grants DHS broad authority to remove aliens to any country willing to accept them when the designated country of removal will not — a provision Congress wrote precisely because some deportees' home countries, like Cuba and Vietnam, routinely refuse repatriation. Murphy is nullifying a direct congressional grant of executive authority on due process grounds the Supreme Court has already twice declined to find sufficient for emergency relief.
The Coordinated Pattern Behind the Individual Cases
The two cases would be notable individually. Together, they form a pattern that the available evidence documents with considerable precision. The DC District Court alone accounted for 15.6 percent of all nationwide injunctions against the Trump administration. A leaked March 2025 Judicial Conference working breakfast memo showed Chief Judge Boasberg — before most of the challenged cases had even been assigned — raising with Chief Justice John Roberts the prospect that the Trump administration would defy unfavorable rulings, as if a strategy for dealing with a named political adversary was appropriate for judicial administrative discussion. Roberts reportedly replied that he hoped this would not occur.
The historical data tells the same story quantitatively. In Trump's first 100 days of his second term, district judges issued at least 25 nationwide injunctions — more than the entire eight-year total imposed on President George W. Bush, and double the pace of the Biden administration's first hundred days. Eighty-four percent of those injunctions were issued by Democratic-appointed judges. The geographic concentration was equally striking: more than half of Trump-era universal injunctions originated in three districts, including Boasberg's own DC District Court.
The pattern is not that judges are wrong to review executive action — they are not, and the constitutional role of the judiciary in checking unlawful executive conduct is indispensable. The pattern is that two specific judges, armed with novel legal theories designed to survive each successive Supreme Court reversal, have treated their courtrooms as instruments of policy resistance rather than forums for legal adjudication.
The Institutional Reckoning
The DC Circuit's August 2025 mandamus opinion against Boasberg was one of the most comprehensive judicial rebukes in recent memory. Judges Gregory Katsas and Neomi Rao found that Boasberg's contempt proceedings represented an "extraordinary" intrusion on core executive functions, that his original orders were ambiguous and could be "reasonably read either way," and that the administration's conduct was "clearly and indisputably not criminal." The court refused even to remand for additional fact-finding — a signal that no further proceedings were warranted.
Yet within months, Boasberg had issued the December constructive custody ruling, and Murphy had issued his February final merits opinion. The Supreme Court is widely expected to intervene a third time in the Murphy case. The DOJ has filed a formal misconduct complaint seeking Boasberg's disqualification from Trump-related cases. Congressional Republicans are investigating the case-assignment process in the DC District Court.
What these two cases ultimately expose is a structural asymmetry in judicial accountability. The Trump administration faces criminal contempt for defying a court order — even one that the Supreme Court later finds was jurisdictionally void. The judges who issue those orders face no professional consequence for being reversed, no matter how many times or how emphatically the reversal is worded. For Boasberg, stopping now would not merely acknowledge that prior rulings were wrong — it would expose his contempt proceedings against Trump officials as having been built on a jurisdictionally void foundation, rendering the administration's "defiance" not just legally defensible but factually correct. For Murphy, withdrawing an 81-page final merits ruling would be an act of judicial self-immolation with no precedent and no professional reward. What looks like the sunk cost fallacy from the outside is, from the inside, a rational institutional calculation: continuing costs a judge nothing, while reversing costs everything. The irrationality is not in the judges' behavior — it is in the system that makes their behavior rational.
The prisoner swap that returned the Venezuelan deportees to their home country, the Maduro superseding indictment naming Tren de Aragua's leader as his co-conspirator, the bipartisan bounty escalation record spanning three administrations, and the Supreme Court's repeated interventions on behalf of the administration's removal authority — these are not arguments in a law review article. They are the factual record. And the factual record has rendered a verdict that neither Boasberg's constructive custody theory nor Murphy's 81-page opinion has managed to answer.
This essay reflects analysis of publicly available court records, Supreme Court orders, appellate opinions, federal indictments, and news reports through February 2026.

-PJ

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.