The Trump administration increased its aggression against a federal judge on Wednesday, threatening to invoke a “state secrets privilege” to refuse detailing exactly when deportation flights took off from U.S. soil this past weekend — a timeline that could prove whether officials ignored a court order.
President Donald Trump’s decision to invoke the Alien Enemies Act to quickly whisk Venezuelan migrants to a grisly Central American prison — despite a federal judge’s order to halt those planes during the operation — is quickly escalating into a full-blown constitutional crisis pitting the executive branch against the courts.
However, in a new court filing, recent political hires at the Department of Justice tried to reduce the current power showdown into what they called “a picayune dispute over the micromanagement of immaterial fact finding.”