In April, a federal appeals court in Washington took what seemed to be a fairly normal step: It temporarily
put on hold a trial judge’s plan to begin contempt proceedings
against the Trump administration to determine whether officials had violated his order stopping flights of Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador.
The move by the appeals court, known as an administrative stay, was supposed to have been an incremental measure intended to buy it time as it considered a more substantial type of stay — one designed to pause the case as the court dug into the merits of the contempt proposal laid out by the trial judge, James E. Boasberg.
But three months later, the three-judge panel that put the stay in place has done nothing at all to push the case forward, allowing it to languish in a kind of legal limbo. And the panel’s lack of action has caught the eye of some legal experts — if only because as it has sat on the case, new evidence has emerged that the Trump administration may have disobeyed Judge Boasberg’s order.
“It’s very unusual,” said Stephen I. Vladeck, a Georgetown University law professor. “An appeals court may need hours or days to figure out an administrative stay, but it doesn’t need weeks and certainly not months.”
The pause imposed by the three judges, who sit on the U.S. Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia, emerged from the first and one of the most contentious cases involving President Trump’s use of a powerful wartime statute, the Alien Enemies Act, to deport Venezuelans accused of being members of a street gang to a notorious prison in El Salvador.
On March 15, the Trump administration sent the first set of flights carrying immigrants to El Salvador, prompting an emergency hearing in front of Judge Boasberg. At the hearing, the judge told the Justice Department that any planes headed to El Salvador under the powers of the act needed to be stopped at once and that any planes already in the air should turn around.
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