Trump, White House Lash Out at Judge Who Ruled on Deporting Migrants to South Sudan

President Donald Trump and the White House levied harsh criticism Thursday against a federal judge who ruled against the administration in a deportation case this week, the latest in a long line of attacks the administration has lodged against judges who halted the president’s actions in his second term.

Trump wrote on his social media platform, Truth Social, on Thursday that the judge in the case, U.S. District Judge Brian E. Murphy in Boston, “knew absolutely nothing about the situation” in which the administration attempted to deport several migrants to South Sudan.

“The Judges are absolutely out of control, they’re hurting our Country, and they know nothing about particular situations, or what they are doing — And this must change, IMMEDIATELY,” Trump added. “ … If this is not worked out quickly, and the World is watching, our Country will be under siege again, with hundreds of thousands of hardened criminals, ‘BREAKING DOWN THE WALLS.’”

Responding to Murphy’s decision, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt at a news briefing Thursday detailed what she said were the criminal convictions of the deportees and called the judge a “liberal activist.”

“[He] is not the secretary of state. He is not the secretary of defense or the commander in chief. He is a district court judge in Massachusetts,” Leavitt said. “He cannot control the foreign policy or the national security of the United States of America, and to suggest otherwise is being completely absurd.”

Murphy, a day earlier, found that the administration had violated a court order in its haste to deport the people, most of whom were not citizens of South Sudan, by denying the migrants time to legally challenge their removal to countries where they are not citizens. He stopped short of ordering their return but directed U.S. officials to determine whether the migrants had a reasonable fear of harm if they are deported to the conflict-ridden nation.

The government charter flight with the deportees appeared to have landed Wednesday near a U.S. naval base in Djibouti, according to publicly available flight-tracking information. Leavitt said the plane will remain in Djibouti “for over two weeks” to comply with the judge’s order.

Murphy’s decision struck a nerve with an administration that has repeatedly cast judges’ attempts to uphold the rights of migrants as a costly impediment to Trump’s broader push on illegal immigration.

“This judge is not only undermining our immigration system, undermining our foreign policy and our national security, but this judge is undermining the safety of the ICE agents who are putting their lives … on the line to remove this list of illegal criminal terrorists,” Leavitt said Thursday. “It’s truly despicable what’s happening in our court system, and the president and this administration hope that the Supreme Court will do what it needs to do to rein in these liberal activist judges.”

The Department of Homeland Security said it deported eight men, seven of whom are not citizens of South Sudan. Administration officials have said all the deportees had been convicted of serious criminal offenses in the United States.

At Thursday’s news conference, Leavitt displayed images of mug shots with the deportees’ nationalities and listed the crimes she said they were convicted of, including murder and sex offenses. Leavitt also said the deportees all had final orders of removal from the United States.

Accommodations for the interviews Murphy ordered were unclear this week, but a U.S. immigration official told the judge that authorities were working with the Defense Department on a possible solution.

Murphy, an appointee of President Joe Biden, is one of several judges to have recently chastised federal authorities for failing to provide sufficient legal due process to targets of their mass deportation efforts. In several instances, judges have ordered the administration to halt deportation flights and, in at least two cases, bring back migrants who were sent to a megaprison in El Salvador. The administration has not brought back the men.

Trump has repeatedly questioned the authority of courts to constrain his actions as president, even though the balance of power between the three branches of government permits lower courts to make initial rulings about the legality of the executive branch’s actions. Those rulings can be appealed all the way up to the Supreme Court.

The administration’s attacks on judges have drawn the rare rebuke of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who has underscored the importance of the judicial branch’s independence. Responding to calls by Trump and his allies to have judges removed, Roberts recently said that “impeachment is not how you register disagreement with a decision.”

In a year-end report issued in December, Roberts also warned about harassment and threats directed at the federal judiciary, saying threats of violence, disinformation and defiance of court orders had risen significantly.

Jurists have repeatedly expressed their concerns about Trump’s attacks on the judiciary, including before he was sworn in for a second term.

More recently, federal judges have said they’re concerned about online threats escalating to real-world violence. Many jurists who have presided over lawsuits challenging the Trump administration’s policies have also reported receiving anonymous pizza deliveries at their homes in what some have characterized as an intimidation tactic.mae