The admonishment of Washington, D.C., District Court Judge James Boasberg is a step in the right direction but the ruling this week didn’t step far enough, Gerard Filitti told show host Jenna Ellis.
A three-judge panel of the Washington, D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 Boasberg abused his discretion.
At issue is a criminal contempt investigation into Trump administration officials and deportation flights for Venezuelan illegals to El Salvador. That incident dates back to March 15, 2025, when planes were landing in El Salvador with alleged gang members but the judge ordered them to turn around and come back.
In a "probable cause" order weeks later, which found the government in contempt, the judge argued the deportees were "spirited out of the United States by the Government before they could vindicate their due-process rights by contesting their removability in a federal court, as the law requires."
Boasberg, a chief judge appointed by President Barack Obama, had launched the yearlong contempt inquiry after alleging the administration willfully defied his order to halt the deportations under the Alien Enemies Act.
The federal appeals court found his order lacked the clarity required for criminal contempt, particularly regarding the transfer of migrants to Salvadoran custody.
Writing for the majority panel, Judge Neomi Rao said Boasberg had assumed "an improper jurisdiction antagonistic to the Executive Branch," according to a Washington Post story about this week's ruling.
“This is an issue that's gotten so serious, the abuse of the judiciary by judges, that it needs to be taken seriously," Filitti said. "There need to be consequences. It does need to happen in order for it to serve as a warning to judges that they need to actually follow the law and not make it up as they go along."
Much of that judicial activism was showing up through an astonishing number of injunctions filed at the District Court level in the early days of Donald Trump’s second term.
The U.S. Supreme Court addressed the issue in Trump v. CASA in June of 2025 with a ruling that limited the power of district court judges to issue nationwide injunctions.
A single district judge should not be able to block a federal policy for everyone nationwide just because one case was filed in their courtroom, the Supremes ruled in a 6-3 decision.
In the first 100 days of the second Trump term there had been 25 nationwide injunctions issued by federal courts.
The month of February alone saw 15 nationwide injunctions. The first three months of Joe Biden’s term saw just 14 injunctions.
Boasberg’s status on the bench should be discussed, Filitti said.
“When you see how detailed this opinion is about Boasberg really stepping outside the bounds, you have to wonder what the consequences are going to be. It may not be enough just to have a slap on the wrist in an opinion. It may be that we are talking about the impeachment of a federal judge," Filitti observed.
Boasberg was appointed to the D.C. District Court in 2011 by Barack Obama.
Earlier in his career he gained favor from conservatives and liberals alike, having been appointed to the Washington, D.C., Superior Court in 2002 by George W. Bush.
He was born in San Francisco, grew up in Washington, D.C., and played basketball at Yale, where he was a magna cum laude graduate in 1985.
The appeals court ruling stopped short of accusing Boasberg of a personal crusade against Trump, but it did say his contempt probe of the president overstepped judicial boundaries by threatening to intrude into high-level executive branch decisions on national security and diplomacy.
While the decision focused on legal grounds — such as the lack of clarity in Boasberg’s order and the separation of powers — it echoed arguments made by the Trump administration, which had accused Boasberg of bias and retaliation.
Boasberg’s pursuit of Trump wasn’t normal
In the 2-1 decision Trump appointees Rao and Justin Walker formed the majority; Biden appointee J. Michelle Childs dissented.
“(The decision) goes into pretty good detail about how Boasberg seems to be engaging on a personal crusade against the administration, taking things well above what a normal case would entail and going far and beyond in an effort to discover everything it can about the government's actions and find it at fault,” Filitti said.
The judges actions have been extreme, going “well beyond what's permitted by law, well beyond what's permitted by the judiciary and well beyond what is permitted in any normal case,” Filitti said.
