Listen To This Story

While neither Donald Trump nor anybody else in his administration is known for engaging in introspection, right about now, they may be reconsidering if their “attack at all costs” and “never give an inch” style of governing was the best course of action in connection with sending more than 200 immigrants to a gulag in El Salvador.

While that might have seemed like a good idea to zealots like Stephen Miller and Tom Homan, those flights have turned into a full-blown constitutional and political crisis for the administration.

And now the bill is coming due.

On Wednesday, US District Judge James Boasberg found probable cause to hold administration officials in criminal contempt for violating his order to keep the deportees in the United States.

“The Court does not reach such conclusion lightly or hastily; indeed, it has given Defendants ample opportunity to rectify or explain their actions,” Boasberg stated in his ruling.

However, he determined that the government’s actions on the day of the flights “demonstrate a willful disregard” for his order to keep the detainees in the US to be afforded an opportunity to contest their deportation.

Instead, the administration rushed them out of the country, which was the start of multiple crises that have highlighted Trump’s blatant disregard for the rule of law and cast a spotlight on a deportation policy that appears to be as half-baked as it is cruel.

For one, while the White House keeps conjuring up alleged crimes that these men have committed, they have not produced evidence showing that they were dangerous gang members, terrorists, human traffickers, etc.

Instead, because the administration has made this into such a high-profile event (complete with photo-ops and promotional videos), journalists and activists have shown that there is reason to believe that most of the detainees had no criminal records, and that at least some of them were completely innocent.

The highest profile case is that of a Salvadoran immigrant living in Maryland who was, by the administration’s own admission, illegally deported. However, even though the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the White House must attempt to bring him back, Trump has not yet lifted a finger to make that happen.

This, too, may end up with administration officials facing contempt charges.

In this case, Boasberg is giving the executive branch more time to remedy the violation of the court order, and he stressed that this would not necessarily require the men to be returned to the US. One possible solution might be to provide them with access to lawyers so that they could challenge their deportation from El Salvador.

Of course, the Trump administration has shown no appetite to offer them any kind of due process. After all, if they were to be able to speak to their families, attorneys, or civil rights groups, things could become even more embarrassing for the administration and could jeopardize public support for the president’s draconian immigration/deportation plans.

Boasberg also ruled that, if the government does nothing to remedy the situation, then it should provide the names of the officials who authorized the flights to go ahead in defiance of his order.

In his Navigating the Insanity columns, Klaus Marre provides the kind of hard-hitting, thought-provoking, and often humorous analysis you won’t find anywhere else.