The underlying dispute traces to March 14–15, 2025, when President Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act, declaring that Tren de Aragua — designated a foreign terrorist organization in February 2025 — had perpetrated an invasion or predatory incursion against the United States. The government transported suspected gang members detained in Raymondville, Texas, to a nearby airport in preparation for their removal. After two flights left U.S. airspace, the district court issued a class-wide temporary restraining order barring the government from removing class members pursuant to the proclamation. The planes landed in El Salvador, where Salvadoran authorities transferred most detainees to the Center for Terrorism Confinement. The Supreme Court later vacated the TRO on the ground that the plaintiffs' claims sounded in habeas corpus and had to be brought in the district of confinement, not the District of Columbia.
Despite that vacatur, the district court pursued criminal contempt on the theory that the government had violated the TRO by relinquishing physical custody to El Salvador. The D.C. Circuit granted a first writ of mandamus vacating the district court's probable cause order. The district court then resumed its inquiry, and after the government identified then-Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem as the official responsible for the transfer decision — and provided declarations from Noem and senior Justice Department and Homeland Security counsel — the district court ordered live hearings to investigate the bases of the decision to transfer the deportees out of United States custody. The hearing order directed the appearance of two government attorneys, one of whom had filed a whistleblower complaint, and explicitly permitted plaintiffs' counsel to participate in questioning.
Writing for the majority, Circuit Judge Rao held that mandamus was warranted on all three required grounds. On the threshold question of adequate alternative relief, the court held that ordinary appellate review could not remedy the harm of forcing senior executive branch officials to submit to judicial interrogation about national security and diplomatic deliberations — particularly given the backdrop of ongoing military and diplomatic initiatives against the Maduro regime in Venezuela, including what the opinion describes as U.S. forces capturing Maduro and bringing him to the United States to face conspiracy charges for narco-terrorism, cocaine trafficking, and possession of illegal weapons. On the merits, the court held that the TRO lacked the clarity and specificity required to support criminal contempt because it said nothing about transferring custody. The TRO enjoined the government from removing class members pursuant to the proclamation, and both the ordinary meaning of remove and the legal context of the Alien Enemies Act — which uses removal to mean expulsion from U.S. territory — confirmed that the order imposed no prohibition on transferring detainees already outside the United States to foreign custody. Because the TRO could not support a criminal contempt charge as a matter of law, the court held the district court's expanding investigation was a clear abuse of discretion.
Circuit Judge Walker concurred separately, emphasizing a single point: before issuing its oral directives at the March 15 hearing, the district court told counsel it would issue a minute order memorializing the oral directive so they did not have to race to write it down. In Walker's view, that assurance made the written order supersede the oral order. Because the written order covered only future removals and said nothing about detainees already outside U.S. territory, and because the government did not remove any additional class members after the written order issued, no order was violated at all.
Circuit Judge Childs dissented, arguing that the majority had intervened at an impermissibly early interlocutory stage, before the district court had made any referral for prosecution or contempt finding. In her view, the district court was doing precisely what prior mandamus proceedings had left open — conducting the factfinding necessary to fairly identify contemnors — and the majority's ruling would allow any litigant to invoke a preferred interpretation of a court order to forestall contempt proceedings before findings are even made.