Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is now at the center of an explosive criminal contempt inquiry, after a new Justice Department filing revealed she personally decided not to turn around deportation flights that a federal judge had ordered the government to recall.
In a late Tuesday filing, the Justice Department laid out, in unusually specific detail, who was in the room and what advice Noem received before she chose to let flights carrying detainees keep heading to a sprawling “mega-prison” in El Salvador. The migrants on board were being held under the Alien Enemies Act, a centuries old law that the Trump administration has aggressively leaned on in its latest immigration crackdown.
According to the filing, the department identified “officials who made and advised on the decision not to recall the flights in transit,” even after U.S. District Judge James Boasberg ordered the government to halt removals. Those flights, already in the air, were never turned around. Instead, detainees were delivered into Salvadoran custody while government lawyers fought over what, exactly, the judge’s order required.
Boasberg, who had previously warned the administration about skating close to the line, has now resumed his criminal contempt inquiry into the episode, putting Noem and a tight circle of senior officials under a harsh new spotlight.
NEW: DOJ said tonight that it was DHS Secretary Kristi Noem who made the call to proceed with the deportation of more than 100 Venezuelan men to El Salvador, despite a judge’s order seeking to block the transfer.
w/ @joshgerstein https://t.co/4lpHxX3p7m pic.twitter.com/XvG5b7As8V
— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) November 26, 2025
The filing says Noem received legal advice before she “directed that the AEA [Alien Enemies Act] detainees who had been removed from the United States before the Court’s order could be transferred to the custody of El Salvador.” In other words, even after the order came down, the administration treated anyone already in transit as essentially gone.
The government insists it did nothing wrong, telling the court that “the written order, unlike the oral directives, said nothing about returning class members who had already been removed.”
“The Government maintains that its actions did not violate the Court’s order, certainly not with the clarity required for criminal contempt, and no further proceedings are warranted or appropriate,” the filing stated seemingly standing behind the decision not to recall the flights.
But Boasberg’s decision to revive his inquiry suggests he is not ready to simply take the administration’s word for it. Criminal contempt requires a clear and willful violation of a court order, and the judge now appears poised to dig into whether Noem and her advisers crossed that line when they let the planes keep going.
The filing names a small group of senior officials around Noem who helped shape the decision. In addition to Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, the government identified Acting DHS general counsel Joseph Mazzara, who advised Noem, as well as Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche and then Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove, who “provided DHS with legal advice regarding the Court’s order as to flights that had left the United States before the order issued.” Deputy Assistant Attorney General Drew Ensign, who is also defending the government in the case, “promptly conveyed both this Court’s oral directives and its written order to the Department of Homeland Security,” the filing said.
For now, the Justice Department is trying to have it both ways, backing its own officials while arguing there is no basis for contempt. Boasberg’s next move will determine whether this stays an embarrassing legal dust up, or turns into a full blown confrontation over whether one of the administration’s most hard line immigration gambits defied a federal court.
