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 prisons in El Salvador.
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 earlier this week 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 that 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: ‘I WON’
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.
The 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.
Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts 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 spectre of open disregard for federal court rulings,” Roberts wrote. “These dangerous suggestions, however sporadic, must be soundly rejected.”
– Agence France-Presse
