Judge calls ‘woefully insufficient’ the Trump administration response to his order

A federal judge on Thursday said the government provided a “woefully insufficient” response to his prior orders in a case over President Trump’s use of wartime powers.

Judge James Boasberg had earlier asked the Trump administration to provide more details about weekend flights that deported hundreds of alleged Venezuelan gang members and other people to El Salvador — despite his order to turn the planes around. He sought more proof the government was complying with his temporary restraining order.

He asked the government to provide details about the flights, or explain why such details fall under “the state-secrets doctrine.” This privilege would allow the government to refuse to provide evidence that a court requests because doing so could harm U.S. national security or foreign relations.

Boasberg initially gave a deadline on Wednesday, and then extended it mid-day on Thursday.

“In an ex parte pleading delivered shortly after today’s deadline, the Government again evaded its obligations,” Boasberg wrote on Thursday. An ex parte pleading means the filings went directly to the judge, without notifying the other parties in the case.

He said the government only provided a six-paragraph declaration from a regional official in Immigration and Customs Enforcement that repeated information shared previously, and added that: “Cabinet Secretaries are currently actively considering whether to invoke the state secrets privilege over the other facts requested by the Court’s order. Doing so is a serious matter that requires careful consideration of national security and foreign relations, and it cannot properly be undertaken in just 24 hours.”

Boasberg called this response “woefully insufficient.”

“To begin, the Government cannot proffer a regional ICE official to attest to Cabinet-level discussions of the state-secrets privilege; indeed, his declaration on that point, not surprisingly, is based solely on his unsubstantiated ‘understand[ing],'” he wrote.

The judge reset the deadlines in the case and asked the government to explain any discussions regarding invoking state secrets privileges by 10a.m. on Friday, and to decide whether to invoke such privilege by March 25.

A spokesperson in a statement said “The Department of Justice continues to believe that the court’s superfluous questioning of sensitive national security information is inappropriate judicial overreach.”

Trump had earlier called for Boasberg’s impeachment, and called him a “lunatic” in an interview with Fox News.

—NPR’s Ryan Lucas contributed to this story.