James Boasberg, the chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, has caught a lot of flak for temporarily blocking the deportation of alleged Venezuelan gang members under the Alien Enemies Act (AEA). As President Donald Trump tells it, Boasberg is a "Radical Left Lunatic of a Judge, a troublemaker and agitator" who is wrongly preventing him from "doing what the VOTERS wanted me to do." According to Trump, Boasberg's intervention was so egregious that he "should be IMPEACHED!!!"
A few hours after that Tuesday-morning Truth Social rant, Rep. Rep. Brandon Gill (R–Texas) followed through on Trump's suggestion, introducing an article of impeachment that charges Boasberg with "high crimes and misdemeanors." Specifically, Gill claims Boasberg "abused the powers of his judicial authority" by "interfering with the President's constitutional prerogatives" and his powers under the AEA, which in Gill's view gives Trump "sole and unreviewable discretion" to decide who qualifies as an "alien enemy" subject to immediate removal from the United States.
As Trump and Gill portray the situation, that understanding of the statute is completely uncontroversial. But if that were true, there would be no case for Boasberg to consider. Far from abusing his judicial authority, Boasberg is doing exactly what he is supposed to do as a federal judge: choosing between dueling interpretations of the law based on arguments and evidence presented in court—an adversarial process that continued at a hearing on Friday afternoon.
