Trump says he wouldn’t defy courts despite claims he ignored deportation order

Donald Trump has repeated his declaration that he would not defy a court ruling, even as controversy swirls about whether his administration has already ignored several of them following a spate of negative judgments that threaten to block his governing agenda.

Anger among the president’s supporters has been simmering against a federal judge, James Boasberg, who ordered a halt to the deportation of more than 200 Venezuelan immigrants last weekend.

The deportation flights to El Salvador went ahead nevertheless, with administration officials claiming that the planes had already departed when the judge issued his order. That, in turn, triggered accusations that Trump had deliberately flouted the courts.

Asked by Laura Ingraham on Fox News if he would ever defy a court ruling, Trump said he would not but launched an attack on Boasberg, without naming him.

“I never did defy and I wouldn’t in the future, no. You can’t do that,” he said. “However, we have very bad judges, and these are judges that shouldn’t be allowed. I think at a certain point you have to start looking at what do you do when you have a rogue judge.

“The judge that we’re talking about is you look at his other rulings … He’s a lunatic.”

Trump renewed his assault in a later post on his Truth Social platform: “If a President doesn’t have the right to throw murderers, and other criminals, out of our country because a radical left lunatic judge wants to assume the role of president, then our country is in very big trouble, and destined to fail!”

The comments followed a rare rebuke from John Roberts, the conservative-leaning chief justice of the US supreme court, who criticised demands by Trump and his supporters, including his wealthiest backer, Elon Musk, that Boasberg be impeached.

Fears over the administration’s readiness to defy the courts – widely seen as the only obstacle to Trump’s rampant agenda in the absence of meaningful resistance from a Republican-ruled Congress – seemed likely to intensify after high-profile negative rulings on Tuesday.

In one, a US district court judge, Theodore Chuang, ruled that Musk and his “department of government efficiency” (Doge) unit had violated the constitution in “multiple ways” in attempting to dismantle USAid.

A separate ruling barred the Pentagon from enforcing Trump’s order banning transgender people from serving in the military, saying it was “soaked in animus”.

Another order on Wednesday by Judge Jesse Furman rebuffed the administration’s effort to dismiss an attempt by Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist, to fight a deportation order and said the case must be heard in New Jersey, rather than Louisiana, where he is now detained.

In yet another case, the government has been forced to rehire more than 7,000 workers at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) who had not finished their probationary period after they were sent unsigned letters telling them they were being fired for poor work performances.

The letters were sent despite an IRS lawyer warning officials that they contained “false statements” that amounted to “fraud”, ProPublica reported.

Trump’s insistence that he would obey the courts is at odds with previous statements from the vice-president, JD Vance, who has suggested he should defy them.

In a 2021 interview with Politico, Vance said Trump – if he were re-elected – should “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, [and] every civil servant in the administrative state … and when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”

The statement attributed to Jackson, president from 1829 to 1837, is widely believed to be apocryphal.

Vance reiterated the sentiment in a social media post in February of this year following an earlier injunction against Doge.

“If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal,” he wrote. “If a judge tried to command the attorney general in how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that’s also illegal. Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”

Legal commentators have warned that a president openly ignoring court orders could portend a slide into dictatorship.

Michael Luttig, a former federal judge, told NBC that Trump had already “declared war on the rule of law”.

“In the past few weeks, the president himself has led a full frontal assault on the constitutional rule of law, the federal judiciary, the American justice system and the nation’s legal profession,” Luttig said. “America is in a constitutional crisis.”