Hamza Adam 
Two legal analysts at Slate agreed the country has reached the point where courts must decide whether they matter.
Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern pointed to the federal judge who ruled over the weekend that President Donald Trump’s administration could not legally deport some of the migrants they sent to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.
Despite two federal judges blocking the use of the act, Trump sent 261 people to El Salvador on Saturday. CBS News reported Monday that 137 of those individuals were deported using the 18th-century law.
The legal experts called it “a new phase of the rolling national constitutional crisis.” The administration ignored it and defied “two different federal court orders,” they explained.
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One individual deported was Rasha Alawieh, a kidney transplant specialist at Brown University. On Friday, a judge halted her removal. Then, U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg explicitly told the Trump administration to turn the planes around before landing in El Salvador.
“The Justice Department claimed that it could not comply with the order barring Alawieh’s removal because it arrived too late,” they explained. “But the White House defended its defiance of the order prohibiting deportations of Venezuelans, insisting that the judge had no jurisdiction over the migrants—and that Trump holds absolute, unreviewable constitutional authority to expel noncitizens.”
“It would appear we have arrived” at the constitutional crisis, the lawyers wrote. Both judges demanded compliance, but it was ignored.
“We are long past the point at which courts have any reason to believe Trump’s lawyers when they use rhetorical tricks and deliberate misdirection to suggest that judicial orders were ambiguous or that compliance is inadvertently delayed in good faith,” the legal experts said. “We are now at the place, only eight weeks into this presidency, at which judges must decide if they will take the necessary steps to enforce their decisions, including sanctions and contempt, or if they will agree to be made irrelevant.”
Judge Boasberg will hold a hearing at 5 p.m. Eastern Time Monday to decide whether to hold those involved in contempt or otherwise punish them for violating his order.
Read the full commentary here.
source https://www.rawstory.com/trump-court-order-constitutional-crisis/
