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WASHINGTON (CN) — The top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee over the weekend warned that lawmakers would step in after a federal judge blocked the Donald Trump administration from using a centuries-old law to deport hundreds of Venezuelan migrants.
Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley, who heads the upper chamber’s legal affairs panel, has largely kept his distance from colleagues who in recent weeks have demanded that federal courts face consequences for rulings that have temporarily halted large swaths of the White House’s ambitious agenda. But his comments, posted to X on Sunday, could represent a shift in his approach to the issue.
“Another day, another judge unilaterally deciding policy for the whole country,” Grassley wrote. “This time to benefit foreign gang members.”
The Iowa Republican was reacting to a Saturday ruling from the Washington-based U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, who ordered the Trump administration to temporarily stop its deportation of roughly 200 Venezuelan migrants who the White House claims are members of the gang Tren de Aragua. The judge, a Barack Obama appointee, paused deportations for 14 days, finding the Trump administration’s invocation of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act “does not provide a basis” to justify such action.
Despite the court order, the administration has continued with some deportations, and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt has said that the court has “no lawful basis” to dictate what she said was the president’s foreign policy.
Grassley, for his part, said that if the Supreme Court or Congress did not address the actions of lower courts, the country would be “headed towards a constitutional crisis.”
“Senate Judiciary [Committee] taking action,” he added. It wasn’t immediately clear what sort of steps Grassley is considering and spokesperson for the Iowa Republican declined to elaborate.
His comments earned praise, though, from billionaire and Trump adviser Elon Musk, who has long called for the removal of federal judges he’s branded as political activists.
“The very worst judges — those who repeatedly flout the law — should at least be put to an impeachment vote, whether that vote succeeds or not,” he wrote in a Monday post on X, which he owns.
Musk’s calls for judicial impeachment have been heeded by some members of Congress, including Tennessee Representative Andy Ogles, who last month filed articles of impeachment against a group of jurists he and other GOP lawmakers say abused their power and blocked Trump’s executive agenda for political reasons.
Ogles and other members of Congress have threatened to undertake impeachment for as many as a dozen federal judges who have ruled against the administration’s efforts to roll back birthright citizenship and pause payments to foreign aid programs, among other policies.
Congress has authority to impeach federal judges for “high crimes and misdemeanors,” the same legal threshold which governs presidential impeachment. And much like impeaching a president, lawmakers would first have to approve articles of impeachment against a judge in the House — and then convict the jurist during a Senate trial.
But so far, the proposed judicial impeachments have largely been relegated to the most conservative corners of Capitol Hill, with GOP leaders in both chambers mostly reticent to support such extreme recourse.
Grassley himself has suggested that the Trump administration follow a more traditional path for challenging court rulings it disagrees with.
“My answer to that is one word: Appeal,” he told Courthouse News in February, adding that the White House should “surely” appeal rulings it believes are unconstitutional.
North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis told Courthouse News earlier this month that attempting to impeach federal judges in the House would be a waste of time.
“I understand the frustration, but how does it play if they send it to us and it fails in committee — and we’ve wasted precious time on something that we know is not going to be achieved?” he said.
And Tillis added that aspersions cast on federal judges by Musk and other Republicans could threaten their safety, pointing to GOP fury over criticisms levied against Supreme Court justices by Democrats amid the ethics debate at the high court.
“We all thought that was bad,” the North Carolina senator said. “So yeah, I guess this is bad too.”
On the House side, Ohio Representative Jim Jordan, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said last month that “everything is on the table” for opposing federal court rulings against the Trump administration, but wouldn’t commit to bringing up his colleagues’ impeachment resolutions.
And California Representative Darrell Issa, who heads the Judiciary Committee’s subpanel on federal courts, told Courthouse News that he had a “high standard” for conduct which meets the threshold of high crimes and misdemeanors for judges. And the recent spate of rulings against the White House, he reasoned, did not meet that standard.
“It might be maladministration, it might be wrong and inappropriate, it might even be done for purely political reasons by judges who have a political lean,” he said. “But it falls short of high crimes, misdemeanors or this question of good behavior.”
Issa, meanwhile, is sponsoring a bill aimed at reducing the scope of nationwide injunctions such as the one issued over the weekend blocking Trump’s deportation effort. The measure cleared the Judiciary Committee earlier this month and heads to the House floor for a vote.
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