By Amy Howe

on Mar 18, 2025 at 3:01 pm

Chief Justice John Roberts criticized a call by President Donald Trump for the impeachment of a federal trial judge who temporarily barred the federal government from deporting noncitizens pursuant to an executive order published on Saturday.

The rare public statement was the latest development in a fast-moving battle over Trump’s efforts to deport noncitizens alleged to be members of a Venezuelan gang pursuant to an eighteenth-century law that had been invoked only three previous times in the country’s history.

Trump’s executive order relied on the Alien Enemies Act, a 1798 law that allows the president to detain or deport citizens of an enemy nation without a hearing or other judicial review when Congress has declared war or when an “invasion” or “predatory incursion” occurs. Trump found that Tren de Aragua “is perpetrating, attempting, and threatening an invasion or predatory incursion against the territory of the United States.” Based on that conclusion, he indicated that “all Venezuelan citizens 14 years of age or older who are members of TdA are liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed as Alien Enemies.”

On Saturday, James Boasberg – the chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia – prohibited the federal government from deporting any noncitizens for 14 days pursuant to the executive order published earlier in the day.

Boasberg also ordered the Trump administration to turn around any flights that had already taken off.

Despite Boasberg’s order, news outlets – including The New York Times – reported that the Trump administration had deported more than 200 noncitizens to El Salvador on Saturday night and Sunday morning. None of the planes carrying those noncitizens landed in El Salvador before Boasberg issued his written order.

Boasberg held another hearing on March 17 on whether the Trump administration had violated his March 15 order. Citing “national security concerns,” a lawyer for the Department of Justice declined to answer the judge’s questions, insisting only that the government had not violated the written order.

In a post on Truth Social on Tuesday morning, Trump contended that Boasberg should be impeached.

In a statement released by the Supreme Court’s Public Information Office on Tuesday, Roberts indicated that “[f]or more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.”

Last year, Roberts handed Trump a significant victory in Trump v. United States, which bolstered the power of the presidency and established that the president is generally immune from criminal prosecution for official acts. But Tuesday’s statement was not Roberts’s first rebuke of Trump. In 2018, after Trump described a federal district judge who had ruled against his administration’s asylum policy as an “Obama judge,” Roberts pushed back. “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges,” Roberts told the Associated Press.

This article was originally published at Howe on the Court.