OPINION:
The attempted hijacking of three U.S. planes over the Gulf of America was thwarted over the weekend. A man wearing a black robe waved a gavel in an attempt to commandeer the aircraft from his bench at a federal courthouse in the District of Columbia. When federal agents rejected the manic demand, the culprit became irate.
That man, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, insisted that 261 exiled foreign cutthroats be recalled while they were airborne, headed to a maximum-security prison in Central America. The judge ordered: “Any plane containing these folks that is going to take off or is in the air needs to be returned to the United States, but those people need to be returned to the United States.”
The aircraft were outside U.S. jurisdiction, so the mission continued as planned. Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele provided a heavily armed welcome for the ruffians he agreed to house for $6 million, a bargain at half the cost to U.S. taxpayers of U.S. prisons.
Responding to the court’s directive that these Tren de Aragua and MS-13 gang members be brought back to U.S. soil, Mr. Bukele mocked the judge. “Oopsie … Too late,” he wrote on X.
Mr. Bukele can be glib because a head of state doesn’t answer to a random judge sitting 2,000 miles away. Pilots in international airspace on an assignment for the commander in chief don’t answer to him, either. Judge Boasberg needs a remedial lesson on the limits of his jurisdiction.
This appointee of President Obama has yet to articulate the legal reasoning behind opposing the administration’s counterterrorism action. He simply rubber-stamped the American Civil Liberties Union’s request for the desperadoes’ immediate restoration.
His order is a prime example of the increasingly broad authority that Democratic-appointed judges have asserted to thwart President Trump’s agenda. “I think it’s pretty clear that my equitable powers do not lapse at the water’s edge, or at the continent’s edge,” his honor asserted at a hearing Monday.
The assertion of limitless ability to meddle in core executive branch functions could force the Supreme Court to intervene in a case featuring the most unsympathetic plaintiffs possible. “These are heinous monsters — rapists, murderers, kidnappers, sexual assaulters, predators — who have no right to be in this country, and they must be held accountable,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Monday.
Democrats went to great lengths to lure these thugs to our shores with open-border policies, but voters handed Mr. Trump a mandate to get rid of them. In a proclamation Friday, the president invoked the Alien Enemies Act to declare the Venezuelan gang a “foreign terrorist organization,” authorizing the removal of any Tren de Aragua member who isn’t a legal U.S. resident.
This power is firmly rooted in the Constitution. In 1788, James Madison noted, “an alien enemy cannot bring suit at all” in a case like this. During the ratification debates, Madison explained that the Constitution leaves “to the Executive the power to repel sudden attacks.” That is an apt description for the predatory incursions of the organized, foreign gang members who took the lives of Laken Riley in Georgia and Jocelyn Nungaray in Texas.
Lowly magistrates have no business attempting to divert air traffic or undermine deals made with foreign heads of state without any concern for the consequences of their reckless actions. It’s time for Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Amy Coney Barrett to stop sitting on the sidelines and rein in the robed hijackers of executive power.
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