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On Friday, President Donald Trump delivered an unusual speech at the Justice Department. Between fulminating against his political adversaries and long digressions about the late basketball coach Bob Knight, Trump declared, “We’re restoring fair, equal, and impartial justice under the constitutional rule of law.”

Then his administration spent the weekend proving otherwise.

People who believe the press is overhyping the danger to rule of law posed by the current administration have pointed out that although administration officials have repeatedly attacked the judicial system, the White House has not actually defied a judge.

But that may not be the case anymore, or for much longer. On Saturday in Washington, D.C., Judge James Boasberg issued a temporary restraining order barring the federal government from deporting Venezuelan immigrants to El Salvador, which it was seeking to do using a 1798 law that bypasses much due process by declaring an enemy invasion. Nonetheless, hundreds of Venezuelans alleged by the administration to be connected with the gang Tren de Aragua landed in El Salvador, where authoritarian President Nayib Bukele has agreed to take them. Separately, a federal judge in Massachusetts is demanding to know why Rasha Alawieh, a Lebanese doctor at Brown University’s medical school, was deported despite a valid visa and a court order temporarily blocking her removal.

The White House insists that it did not actually defy Boasberg’s judicial order, but its arguments are very hard to take at face value. “The Administration did not ‘refuse to comply’ with a court order,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. “The order, which had no lawful basis, was issued after terrorist [Tren de Aragua] aliens had already been removed from U.S. territory.” She’s trying to have it both ways—the order is unlawful, but also we didn’t ignore it. “The written order and the Administration’s actions do not conflict,” Leavitt said.

Although Boasberg’s written order did not specify, the judge told attorneys during the Saturday hearing that “any plane containing these folks that is going to take off or is in the air needs to be returned to the United States.” Politico reports that the plane left during a break in the hearing, as though the government was angling to get out just ahead of any mandate. During a briefing today, Leavitt also questioned whether the verbal order held the same weight as a written order, which is a matter of settled law. During a hearing early this evening, Boasberg seemed incredulous at the Justice Department’s arguments, calling one a “heck of a stretch.”

In the Boston case, a Customs and Border Protection official said in a sworn declaration that the agency had not received formal notification of the judge’s order when it deported Alawieh. CBP said in a statement yesterday that “arriving aliens bear the burden of establishing admissibility to the United States.”

The statements of Trump administration officials elsewhere make it even harder to take their actions as anything other than attempting to defy judges. Salvadoran President Bukele posted a screenshot of a New York Post story about the judge’s order on X with the commentary, “Oopsie … Too late” and a laughing-crying emoji. Chief Bureaucrat Elon Musk replied with the same emoji, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio shared Bukele’s post from his own account. “Border czar” Tom Homan appeared on Fox News this morning and said, “We’re not stopping. I don’t care what the judges think. I don’t care what the left thinks. We’re coming.”

These actions should be terrifying no matter who is involved. The fact that Tren de Aragua is indeed a vicious gang doesn’t nullify the law—the administration’s claim that the U.S. is contending with a wartime invasion is ridiculous on its face. Even more important is whether the White House decided to snub a ruling by a federal judge. Nor do customs officials’ claims in court filings that they found “sympathetic photos and videos” of Hezbollah leaders on Alawieh’s phone, or that she told them she had attended the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s funeral, mean the law doesn’t apply. For all we know, her actions may well justify her deportation. (Of course, we have little way of assessing any of these allegations clearly, because the administration has sidestepped the usual judicial proceedings in both cases. A lawyer for Alawieh’s family hasn’t commented on the allegations.) What matters is that the executive branch acted despite a judge’s order.

This is what we might call the Mahmoud Khalil test: No matter whether you think someone’s ideas or actions are deplorable, once the executive branch decides it doesn’t have to follow the law for one person, it has established that it doesn’t have to follow the law for anyone. After Khalil was arrested, Trump said that he was “the first arrest of many to come.” No one should have any illusion that the list will stop with alleged Tren de Aragua members. Throughout his career, Trump has tested boundaries and, if allowed to do so, pushed further. His actions at the start of this term show that he is more emboldened than ever, and traditionally institutionalist figures such as Rubio seem eager to abet him.

Watching Trump’s DOJ address, supposedly about law and order, offers some ideas of who else he might target while ignoring the law. So do his social-media accounts. This morning on Truth Social, Trump claimed that former President Joe Biden’s pardons of Liz Cheney and other members of the House January 6 Committee were not valid. “The ‘Pardons’ that Sleepy Joe Biden gave to the Unselect Committee of Political Thugs, and many others, are hereby declared VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT, because of the fact that they were done by Autopen,” Trump wrote. “In other words, Joe Biden did not sign them but, more importantly, he did not know anything about them!”

Trump wouldn’t bother with this if he didn’t hope to prosecute the people involved. Although Biden’s pardons were controversial because they were issued preemptively, the idea that an autopen, which allows the user to sign remotely, would invalidate them is concocted out of thin air. (Nor has Trump provided evidence that Biden did in fact use an autopen in these cases.) The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel wrote a justification for the practice in 2005, and presidents have been using them to sign legislation since 2011, without serious incident. The Supreme Court could conceivably rule in favor of Trump’s view—the justices have adopted other long-shot Trump claims—but it is hard to imagine, and would be a real departure.

When Trump speaks about law and order, he means it very narrowly. He believes in swift justice for his adversaries, with or without due process of the law; meanwhile, he believes his actions should not be constrained by law, the Constitution, or anything else that might cause him problems, and he has used pardons prolifically to excuse the actions of his friends and allies, whether Paul Manafort and Roger Stone or January 6 rioters. Plenty of presidents have been frustrated by the limitations of the law. Richard Nixon even claimed, years after leaving office, that any action by the president, as head of the executive branch, is de facto legal. But no president until now has so aggressively or so frequently acted as though he didn’t need to follow the law’s most basic precepts.

Back in November, my colleague Tom Nichols invoked the Peruvian politician Óscar Benavides. Though he’s little known in the United States, here are a few striking facts about him: He served as president twice, first coming to power not through a popular election but through appointment by an elected assembly. Some years later, he returned to the presidency as an unabashed authoritarian. (Hmm.) “For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law,” goes a quote sometimes attributed to Benavides. It could be the motto of the Trump administration over the past four days.

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Today’s News

At least 42 people died after a powerful storm system hit central and southern U.S. states over the weekend, according to officials. The Energy Department, EPA, and NOAA started hiring back probationary employees after federal judges recently ruled that their firings were illegally carried out and ordered their reinstatement. Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin are scheduled to speak on the phone tomorrow about a cease-fire with Ukraine. Trump said yesterday that he expects the conversation to include discussions about Ukraine’s power plants, and that there have already been talks about “dividing up” Ukrainian assets.

Dispatches

Work in Progress: “Buy, Borrow, Die”—this is how to be a billionaire and pay no taxes, Rogé Karma writes. The Wonder Reader: Finding love has never been easy, but this is a particularly tricky moment for romance, Isabel Fattal writes.

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Evening Read

Illustration by Jonelle Afurong / The Atlantic. Sources: Marsell Gorska Gautier / Getty; naumoid / Getty.

Sex Without Women

By Caitlin Flanagan

What a testament to man—how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties!—that he continued doing anything else after the advent of online porn. Plenty of women, of course, consume and enjoy or create and profit from porn—people of every sexual orientation and gender identity do. But the force that through the green fuse drives the flower (and the money) is heterosexual male desire for women. And here was porn so good, so varied, so ready to please, so instantly—insistently—available, that it led to a generation of men who think of porn not as a backup to having sex, but as an improvement on it. They prefer it.

Read the full article.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Less than a month into the second Trump administration, the White House began publicly toying with the idea of defying court orders. In the weeks since then, it’s continued to flirt with the suggestion, not ignoring a judge outright but pushing the boundaries of compliance by searching for loopholes in judicial demands and skirting orders for officials to testify. And now the administration may have taken its biggest step yet toward outright defiance—though, as is typical of the Trump presidency, it has done this in a manner so haphazard and confused that it’s difficult to untangle what actually happened. But even amid that haze, so much is very clear: Donald Trump’s most dangerous tendencies—his hatred of immigrants; his disdain for the legal process; his willingness to push the boundaries of executive authority; and, newly, his appetite for going to war with the courts—are magnifying one another in a uniquely risky way.

The case in question involves Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act to accelerate deportations of Venezuelan migrants without going through the normal process mandated by immigration law. The statute, which is almost as old as the country itself, has an unsavory pedigree: It was passed in 1798 along with the notorious Alien and Sedition Acts, part of a crackdown on domestic dissent in the midst of rising hostilities between France and the fledgling United States. Before this weekend, it had been used only three times in the country’s history. On Friday, at a speech at the Justice Department—itself a bizarre breach of the tradition of purportedly respecting the department’s independence from the president—Trump hinted that he would soon be invoking the statute, this time against migrants whom the administration had deemed to be members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.

From here, the timeline becomes—perhaps intentionally—confusing. At some point over the ensuing 24 hours, though it remains unclear exactly when, Trump signed an executive order to that effect. Before that order was even public, the ACLU filed suit in federal court seeking to block the deportation of five Venezuelans who it believed might be removed. (In a sickening twist, several of the plaintiffs say they are seeking asylum in the United States because of persecution by Tren de Aragua.) By 5 p.m. on Saturday, Judge James Boasberg of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia had convened a hearing over Zoom. Things had happened quickly enough that the judge apologized at the beginning of the hearing for his casual appearance; he had departed for a weekend away without packing his judicial robes.

[Read: ICE isn’t delivering the mass deportation Trump wants]

Thanks to the Alien Enemies Act’s age and sparse use, many of the legal questions around its invocation are novel, and Boasberg admitted to struggling to make sense of these issues so quickly. The broad authority to rapidly remove noncitizens clearly appealed to Trump, who has always been adept at identifying and exploiting grants of executive power that allow him to put pressure on the weak points of the constitutional order. In an additional twist, the administration announced that it would be using this authority not just to deport supposed members of Tren de Aragua who lack U.S. citizenship or permanent residency, but to send them to a horrific Salvadorean mega-prison established by El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, the self-professed “coolest dictator in the world.”   

The problem with this clever scheme, as the ACLU argued during the Saturday-evening hearing, is that the Alien Enemies Act does not actually apply to this situation. The statute provides the president with the authority to detain and quickly remove “all natives, citizens, denizens, or subjects” of a “hostile nation or government” in the event of a declared war against the United States or an “invasion or predatory incursion.” The United States is, obviously, not at war with Venezuela; Tren de Aragua, against which the executive order is directed, is not a “nation or government”; and in no reasonable sense is an invasion or incursion taking place. Trump is attempting to get around these many problems by proclaiming Tren de Aragua to be “closely aligned” with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, to the extent that the gang and the Venezuelan government constitute a “hybrid criminal state.” Building on several years of unsuccessful right-wing legal efforts to frame migration across the U.S.-Mexico border as an “invasion,” the executive order likewise frames Tren de Aragua’s presence within the United States as an “invasion or predatory incursion.”

These claims range from weak to laughable, and that’s before we consider the range of other legal problems raised by Trump’s use of the law. The best card the government has to play is the argument that courts simply can’t second-guess the president’s assertions here, based on a 1948 case in which the Supreme Court found that it couldn’t evaluate President Harry Truman’s decision to continue detaining a German citizen under the Alien Enemies Act well after the end of World War II. But the circumstances of that case, Ludecke v. Watkins, were substantially different from the circumstances today. During Saturday’s hearing, Judge Boasberg concluded that the ACLU had made a strong argument that the Alien Enemies Act can’t be invoked against a gang. At the ACLU’s request, the judge not only issued a temporary order barring deportation of the five plaintiffs under the Alien Enemies Act, but also blocked the administration from removing any other Venezuelan migrants from the country on those grounds while litigation continues.

[Quinta Jurecic: What if the Trump administration defies a court order?]

If the chain of events ended there, this would be a familiar narrative about Trump’s hostility to immigration and his penchant for making aggressive arguments in court. But there is another layer to this story that moves it into the territory of potential crisis. While the timeline remains confused, it appears that at least three planes traveled from the U.S. to El Salvador on Saturday evening, two of them departing during the hearing; all three flights arrived in El Salvador (following stopovers in Honduras) after Boasberg issued both oral and written rulings barring the deportations. A White House spokesperson confirmed to The Washington Post that 137 people on the flights had been deported under the Alien Enemies Act.

President Bukele has adopted a posture of smug mockery toward the court: “Oopsie … Too late,” he posted on X yesterday morning, with a screenshot of a news story about the judge’s ruling. Secretary of State Marco Rubio shared the post. But the Trump administration can’t seem to decide what exactly happened and whether or not what happened was a gutsy commitment to presidential power or, instead, a terrible mistake. An Axios story published last night quotes a jumble of anonymous officials apparently at odds with one another: “It’s the showdown that was always going to happen between the two branches of government,” one official said, while another frantically clarified, “Very important that people understand we are not actively defying court orders.” The administration appears to have settled on the baffling argument that it wasn’t actually defying Judge Boasberg, because the order didn’t apply to planes that were already in the air and outside U.S. territory. To be clear, that is not how things work.

The judge has called for a hearing at 5 p.m. today, when the government will be required to answer a range of questions posed by the ACLU as to when the flights departed and landed and what happened to the people on them. We should pay close attention to what the Justice Department says in court, where lies—unlike quotes to reporters or comments on television—can be punished by judicial sanctions. The administration has talked a big game about its willingness to ignore the courts, but in this instance, it may have engineered a legal crisis at least in part by accident. Will it be able to muster the same audacity when standing in front of a judge?

The Trump administration has sparked fury by deporting alleged “Venezuelan gang members” to El Salvador.

The US president invoked a 1798 law to deport alleged members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua to El Salvador.

An order to halt the removal of 261 people came too late and had "no legal basis" anyway, the White House says.

“Can the Trump administration say Venezuela is intentionally flooding the United States with specific gang members?"