by In what appeared to be a fairly routine move, a federal appeals court in Washington in April temporarily halted a trial judge’s intention to start contempt proceedings against the Trump administration in order to ascertain whether officials had broken his order to halt flights of Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador.
The appeals court’s action, known as an administrative stay, was meant to be an incremental step to buy it time while it examined a more significant kind of stay that would have paused the case while the court examined the merits of the contempt proposal presented by trial judge James E. Boasberg.
However, the three-judge panel that issued the stay has done nothing to advance the case, leaving it in a state of legal limbo three months later. Additionally, some legal experts have taken notice of the panel’s inaction, if only because during its deliberations, fresh evidence has surfaced suggesting that the Trump administration may have violated Judge Boasberg’s ruling.
Stephen I. Vladeck, a professor of law at Georgetown University, described it as highly rare. An administrative stay can be decided by an appeals court in a matter of hours or days, but not weeks or months.
The first and most controversial case involving President Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act, a potent wartime statute, to deport Venezuelans accused of being street gang members to a notorious prison in El Salvador was the reason for the pause imposed by the three judges who sit on the U.S. Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia.
Judge Boasberg held an emergency hearing after the Trump administration dispatched the first group of flights bringing immigrants to El Salvador on March 15. The judge instructed the Justice Department during the hearing to immediately stop any aircraft traveling to El Salvador under the act’s authority and to turn around any aircraft that were already in the air.
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