Bonds are also the cleanest solution.
A federal judge on Saturday ordered planes carrying hundreds of violent Venezuelan gang members to turn around and return to the United States. Some were deported anyway and now the judge is demanding to know if the Trump administration defied his order.
Judge James Boasberg held an emergency hearing Monday and ordered the government to produce further details on the flights and passengers by noon on Tuesday.
Meanwhile, the fight is escalating.
Democrats are crying constitutional crisis, and on Monday the Department of Justice filed a motion to dissolve the temporary restraining order and requested that the judge be removed from the case.
The drama is overblown. There is an easy answer to the question of whether the administration is defying a court order. There was nothing to defy. Boasberg’s order was invalid on its face—because it did not include a bond.
Federal judges are bound by the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which have the force of law. Rule 65(c) explicitly states that judges “may issue a preliminary injunction or temporary restraining order only if the movant” posts a bond to cover “the costs and damages sustained by any party found to have been wrongfully enjoined or restrained.”
Here, those costs include, at a minimum, the expense of turning planes around and housing hundreds of violent criminals in American jails for at least 14 days under Boasberg’s expanded order shielding all Tren de Aragua gang members in the U.S. Based on the hourly cost of deportation flights and daily incarceration rates, the required bond should be at least $2.5 million.
Yet nowhere in his order did Boasberg require these violent thugs to post bond.
Fortunately, President Donald Trump has begun to raise the alarm.
