A US federal judge on Wednesday threatened to open a contempt of court inquiry over the Trump administration’s deportation flights to El Salvador, signaling the judiciary’s pushback to the White House’s apparent defiance of court orders.
The threat came a day after another judge opened an inquiry into the government’s response to a Supreme Court order in a separate immigration case.
The decisions “represented a remarkable attempt by jurists to hold the White House accountable for its apparent willingness to flout court orders,” The New York Times wrote. The administration is “daring the federal courts to take much more aggressive steps to block its immigration policies,” a legal expert wrote in The Atlantic.