In re: Donald Trump

── In re: Donald Trump ── Court: Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit Date: April 14, 2026 Category: General United States Court of Appeals FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA CIRCUIT Decided April 14, 2026 No. 25-5452 IN RE: DONALD J. TRUMP, ET AL., PETITIONERS On Petition for Writ of Mandamus (No. 1:25-cv-00766) Brett A. Shumate, Assistant Attorney General, U.S. Department of Justice, Yaakov M. Roth, Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General, and Tiberius T. Davis, Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General, were on the petition for writ of mandamus and the reply in support of the petition for writ of mandamus. Evelyn Danforth-Scott, My Khanh Ngo, Cody Wofsy, Lee Gelernt, Daniel Galindo, Ashley Gorski, Patrick Toomey, Omar Jadwat, Hina Shamsi, Arthur B. Spitzer, Scott Michelman, Aditi Shah, and Kathryn Huddleston were on the opposition to the petition for writ of mandamus. Michael Tan entered an appearance. Before: RAO, WALKER, and CHILDS, Circuit Judges. Opinion for the Court filed by Circuit Judge RAO. Concurring opinion filed by Circuit Judge WALKER. Dissenting opinion filed by Circuit Judge CHILDS.  2 RAO, Circuit Judge: More than a year ago, the President invoked the Alien Enemies Act against members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan criminal gang and foreign terrorist organization, and ordered that they be detained and removed from the United States. In a series of fast-moving events on March 15, 2025, the government placed a group of alleged gang members, including plaintiffs in this case, on planes to El Salvador. After the planes took off and left the country, the district court ordered the government not to remove the plaintiffs from the United States. The Supreme Court vacated the district court’s order because it was premised on a legal error and the plaintiffs’ suit was brought in the wrong court. Nonetheless, the district court threatened to hold government officials in criminal contempt unless they complied with the now-vacated order by, for instance, taking back custody of the plaintiffs. We issued a writ of mandamus vacating the court’s first contempt order. Undeterred, the district court is proceeding with criminal contempt for the government’s decision to transfer the plaintiffs to the custody of El Salvador. To cooperate, the government identified then-Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem as the official responsible for the transfer decision. The district court previously said this was the only information it required to make a referral for prosecution. But the district court has now expanded its inquest and ordered hearings to extract more information from government counsel about exactly what happened last March. The government petitions for mandamus. The widening gyre of the district court’s investigation again calls for the extraordinary remedy of mandamus to halt the judicial “impairment of another branch in the performance of its constitutional duties.” Cheney v. U.S. Dist. Ct. for D.C.,  3 542 U.S. 367, 390 (2004) (cleaned up). The district court proposes to probe high-level Executive Branch deliberations about matters of national security and diplomacy. These proceedings are a clear abuse of discretion, as the district court’s order said nothing about transferring custody of the plaintiffs and therefore lacks the clarity to support criminal contempt based on the transfer of custody. Moreover, the government has already provided the name of the responsible official, so further judicial investigation is unnecessary and therefore improper. In these circumstances, mandamus is appropriate to prevent the district court from assuming an antagonistic jurisdiction that encroaches on the autonomy of the Executive Branch. I. Our assessment of the government’s second petition for a writ of mandamus must account for the remarkable proced