Donald Trump’s rumbling conflict with the judiciary burst into open confrontation on Tuesday as Supreme Court Justice John Roberts issued a rare public rebuke of the US president over his call for the impeachment of a federal court judge.
“For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision,” Roberts said in a statement. “The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.”
Roberts’s extraordinary rebuke of the president came shortly after Trump called for the impeachment of a federal judge who ordered the suspension of deportation flights of alleged illegal migrants.
“This judge, like many of the Crooked Judges’ I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post.
The White House has been critical of federal district courts which have blocked some of the president’s executive actions but this was the first time Trump has personally called for a judge’s impeachment since he took office in January.
Federal judges are nominated by the president for life and can only be removed by being impeached by the House of Representatives for “high crimes or misdemeanors” and convicted by the Senate.
Impeachment of federal judges is exceedingly rare and the last time a judge was removed by Congress was in 2010.
Shortly after Trump’s message, a Republican lawmaker from Texas, Brandon Gill, said on X that articles of impeachment would be introduced in the House “very soon.”
Trump, the first convicted felon to serve in the White House, has a history of attacking the state and federal judges who presided over his civil and criminal cases.
District Judge James Boasberg ordered a suspension over the weekend to the deportation flights taking alleged members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua to El Salvador where they were put in prison.
The White House invoked little-used, centuries-old wartime legislation known as the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 as legal justification for the move. However, no evidence has been made public to confirm the deportees were gang members or even in the country illegally.
Boasberg held a hearing on Monday on whether the White House had deliberately ignored his orders by carrying out the flights but did not immediately issue a ruling.
Justice Department lawyers told the judge the more than 200 Venezuelan migrants had already left the United States when he issued a written order barring their departure.
Boasberg, the chief judge of the federal district court in Washington, also no longer had jurisdiction once the planes had left US airspace, they argued.
The Justice Department had previously filed a motion with an appeals court seeking to have the judge removed from the case saying he was interfering with the president’s lawful “conduct of foreign policy.”
Trump, in his Truth Social post, called Boasberg a “Radical Left Lunatic of a Judge, a troublemaker and agitator who was sadly appointed by Barack Hussein Obama.”
Trump said the judge “was not elected President.”
“I WON FOR MANY REASONS, IN AN OVERWHELMING MANDATE, BUT FIGHTING ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION MAY HAVE BEEN THE NUMBER ONE REASON FOR THIS HISTORIC VICTORY,” he said.
Yale-educated Boasberg, 62, was appointed to the DC Superior Court by president George W. Bush, a Republican, and named a district court judge by Obama, a Democrat.
The White House has repeatedly lashed out following court rulings it disagrees with such as the rejection of Trump’s bid to end birthright citizenship.
Trump’s bid to amass power in the executive has increasingly raised fears he will openly defy the judiciary, triggering a constitutional crisis.
Roberts, the chief justice, warned of the danger of ignoring court rulings in a year-end letter in December.
“Elected officials from across the political spectrum have raised the specter of open disregard for federal court rulings,” Roberts wrote. “These dangerous suggestions, however sporadic, must be soundly rejected.”
