United States Court of Appeals
         FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA CIRCUIT



                  Decided August 8, 2025

                        No. 25-5124

                       J.G.G., ET AL.,
                         APPELLEES

                             v.

 DONALD J. TRUMP, IN HIS OFFICIAL CAPACITY AS PRESIDENT
             OF THE UNITED STATES, ET AL.,
                      APPELLANTS


       Appeal from the United States District Court
              for the District of Columbia and
      Emergency Motion for a Stay Pending Appeal or,
          in the Alternative, a Writ of Mandamus
                    (No. 1:25-cv-00766)



     Pamela J. Bondi, Attorney General, U.S. Department of
Justice, Yaakov M. Roth, Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney
General, Drew C. Ensign, Deputy Assistant Attorney General,
Emil Bove, Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General, and
Chad Mizelle, Acting Associate Attorney General, were on
appellants’ emergency motion for a stay pending appeal or, in
the alternative, a writ of mandamus and the reply. August E.
Flentje, Acting Director, entered an appearance.
                               2
    Richard P. Hutchison was on the brief for amicus curiae
Landmark Legal Foundation in support of appellants.

     Lee Gelernt, Daniel Galindo, Ashley Gorski, Patrick
Toomey, Omar Jadwat, Hina Shamsi, My Khanh Ngo, Cody
Wofsy, Arthur B. Spitzer, Scott M. Michelman, Aditi Shah,
Somil B. Trivedi, Bradley Girard, Michael Waldman, Sarah
Rich, Audrey Wiggins, Christine L. Coogle, and Pooja Boisture
were on appellees’ motion to dismiss the appeal and opposition
to appellants’ emergency motion for a stay pending appeal or,
in the alternative, a writ of mandamus.

    Before: PILLARD, KATSAS, and RAO, Circuit Judges.

    Opinion for the Court filed Per Curiam.

    Concurring opinion filed by Circuit Judge KATSAS.

    Concurring opinion filed by Circuit Judge RAO.

    Dissenting opinion filed by Circuit Judge PILLARD.

     Per Curiam: This matter arises from challenges to the
government’s removal of alleged members of the transnational
criminal gang Tren de Aragua (TdA) pursuant to a presidential
proclamation designating TdA members as alien enemies
under the Alien Enemies Act, 

. Invocation of
the Alien Enemies Act Regarding the Invasion of the United
States by Tren de Aragua, 

 (Mar. 20, 2025).
On March 15, 2025, five alleged TdA members sued on their
own behalf and as representatives of a proposed class to direct
the President, the Secretary of State, the Attorney General, the
Secretary of Homeland Security, and the Acting Director of
Immigration and Customs Enforcement to halt their impending
removals pursuant to the proclamation. That same day, the
district court held an emergency hearing, provisionally
                               3
certified a class of aliens subject to the proclamation, and
issued a temporary restraining order (TRO) barring their
removal. The government nonetheless flew class members
from the United States to El Salvador and transferred them into
the custody of Salvadoran authorities. According to the
government, the TRO barred only the removal of class
members from United States territory, which had already
occurred before the TRO was entered. According to the district
court, the TRO barred the removal of class members from
United States custody, and the government likely violated it by
transferring the class members into Salvadoran custody after
the TRO was entered.

     In response to these events, the district court issued an
order and accompanying opinion finding probable cause that
some federal officials willfully violated the TRO. The court
offered the government an option to “purge” the putative
contempt by asserting custody over the removed individuals or
proposing other methods of coming into compliance. Order,
J.G.G. v. Trump, No. 25-cv-766 (JEB), Dkt. No. 80 (D.D.C.
Apr. 16, 2025); see Memorandum Opinion, J.G.G. v. Trump,
No. 25-cv-766 (JEB), 

, at *20 (D.D.C. Apr.
16, 2025) (the government may “propose other methods of
coming into compliance, which the Court will evaluate”). The
court also stated that, if the government opts not to purge, it
must identify the Executive Branch officials who, aware of the
court’s TRO, made the decision not to halt the transfer of class
members out of U.S. custody on March 15 and 16, 2025.
Order, Dkt. No. 80. The court further stated that its “next step
would be” to “request that the contempt be prosecuted by an
attorney for the government.” Memorandum Opinion, 

 at *21 (quoting Fed. R. Crim. P. 42(a)(2)). And
it stated: “If the government ‘declines’ or ‘the interest of
justice requires,’ the Court will ‘appoint another attorney to
prosecute the contempt.’” 

 (quoting same rule).
                               4
    The government appealed the probable-cause order and
moved for an emergency stay or a writ of mandamus
terminating the criminal-contempt proceedings. The plaintiffs
moved to dismiss the appeal. This Court granted an
administrative stay pending consideration of these motions.

     We grant the appellees’ motion to dismiss the appeal for
lack of appellate jurisdiction. See Cohen v. Beneficial Indus.
Loan Corp., 

 (1949); I.A.M. Nat’l Pension Fund
Benefit Plan A v. Cooper Indus., Inc., 

 (D.C.
Cir. 1986). The panel is unanimous on this point.

     Judge Katsas and Judge Rao conclude that the government
has satisfied the stringent requirements for a writ of mandamus.
The Court therefore grants the government’s petition for
mandamus and vacates the district court’s probable-cause
order. Judge Pillard dissents from the grant of mandamus and
the vacatur.
     KATSAS, Circuit Judge, concurring: This case involves an
extraordinary, ongoing confrontation between the Executive
and Judicial Branches. On March 15, 2025, the Executive
sought to implement a presidential proclamation mandating the
swift, wholesale removal of adult members of the Venezuelan
criminal gang Tren de Aragua (TdA)—a designated foreign
terrorist organization.     This operation required precise
coordination among at least three different sovereign nations,
as planes carrying more than 100 alleged TdA members flew
from Texas to Honduras to El Salvador. The operation also
involved a transfer of physical custody over these detainees
from the United States to El Salvador, accomplished at a
Salvadoran airport with Salvadoran security forces assembled
en masse. But while this operation was ongoing, five alleged
TdA members sued in Washington, D.C. to prevent the
removals, and the district court urgently attempted—within a
matter of hours—to preliminarily assess their lawfulness.
After flights carrying some of the alleged TdA members had
exited United States airspace, the court, through a minute order,
temporarily restrained the removals. According to the
Executive Branch, the removals had already occurred before
the TRO was entered. According to the district court, the
Executive carried out the removals in defiance of the TRO.

     In response to these events, the district court initiated a
criminal-contempt proceeding. The court found probable
cause that some federal officials willfully violated the TRO,
and it ordered the government to identify who. The court
offered to stand down if the Executive Branch chose to purge
the putative contempt by asserting custody over the removed
individuals—Venezuelan nationals then being detained by the
Salvadoran government in El Salvador. If necessary, the court
promised to appoint a private attorney to prosecute the
responsible Executive Branch officials. And it did all this to
vindicate a TRO that the Supreme Court had vacated for lack
of jurisdiction. The district court’s order raises troubling
questions about judicial control over core executive functions
                               2
like the conduct of foreign policy and the prosecution of
criminal offenses. And it implicates an unsettled issue whether
the judiciary may impose criminal contempt for violating
injunctions entered without jurisdiction.

      At the end of this dispute lies a much simpler question. By
its terms, the TRO prohibited the government from “removing”
suspected TdA members. This prohibition could be interpreted
in either of two ways. It might have barred the government
simply from expelling detainees from United States territory.
Or, it might have barred the government from surrendering
custody of the detainees to a foreign sovereign. All agree that
the government did not violate the TRO under the former view,
so the contempt question boils down to a straightforward
interpretive dispute over what constituted “removing” within
the meaning of the TRO. For purposes of criminal contempt,
ambiguities in the underlying injunction must be resolved in
favor of the alleged contemnor. At the time of the alleged
contempt, just hours after the TRO hearing and before any
transcript of it was available, the district court’s minute order
could reasonably have been read either way. Thus, the TRO
cannot support a criminal-contempt conviction here.

     The government has sought review of the probable-cause
order by way of appeal and mandamus. There is no basis for
interlocutory appellate jurisdiction. Nonetheless, mandamus is
appropriate because the government is plainly correct about the
merits of the criminal contempt, and our saying so now would
prevent long disputes between the Executive and the Judiciary
over difficult, contentious issues regarding the courts’ power to
control foreign policy or prosecutions, or to impose criminal
sanctions for violating injunctions entered without jurisdiction.
In circumstances much less fraught than these, courts have
reviewed interlocutory orders through mandamus to prevent
extended inter-branch conflict.
                                3
     For these reasons, I concur in the order granting the
petition for mandamus and vacating the probable cause order.

                                I

                                A

     The Alien Enemies Act authorizes the President, during
times of conflict, to remove aliens with allegiance to a hostile
foreign nation. The statute applies whenever the United States
is in a declared war or “any invasion or predatory incursion is
perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of the
United States by any foreign nation.” 

. In those
circumstances, the President may “make[] public proclamation
of the event,” in which case all nationals of the hostile country
who are at least 14 years old and “within the United States”
become “liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured, and
removed as alien enemies.” 

     Tren de Aragua is a transnational criminal organization
based in Venezuela. On February 20, 2025, the Secretary of
State designated TdA as a foreign terrorist organization under
the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996.
That statute allows the Secretary of State, after consulting with
the Secretary of the Treasury and the Attorney General, to
designate as a “foreign terrorist organization” any foreign
group engaging in terrorism that “threatens the security of
United States nationals or the national security of the United
States.” 

(a)(1)(C); see 

 § 1189(a)(1), (d)(4).
To support such a designation, the Secretary must make
findings based on an administrative record.              See id.
§ 1189(a)(2)(A)(i), (3)(A). The designated FTO may seek
judicial review. See id. § 1189(c)(1); Nat’l Council of
Resistance of Iran v. Dep’t of State, 

, 196–97
(D.C. Cir. 2001). The consequences of a designation are
severe: Alien members of a designated FTO are inadmissible
                               4
to the United States. 

(a)(3)(B)(i)(V), (vi)(I). It
is a criminal offense to knowingly provide material support to
the FTO. 18 U.S.C. § 2339B(a)(1). And the FTO’s funds are
frozen. Id. § 2339B(a)(2). Prior administrations had imposed
other sanctions to curb TdA’s human and drug trafficking in
the United States. See Notice of OFAC Sanctions Actions, 

 (July 16, 2024); Treasury Sanctions Tren de
Aragua as a Transnational Criminal Organization, U.S. Dep’t
of the Treasury (July 11, 2024), https://perma.cc/6FYN-JMGP.

     On Friday, March 14, 2025, the President issued an AEA
proclamation directed at TdA. See Invocation of the Alien
Enemies Act Regarding the Invasion of the United States by
Tren de Aragua, 

 (Mar. 20, 2025). The
proclamation found that TdA is conducting “irregular warfare”
against the United States by committing “brutal crimes,
including murders, kidnappings, extortions, and human, drug,
and weapons trafficking.” 

. The proclamation
further noted TdA’s designation as an FTO, as well as a 2024
statement by the International Criminal Police Organization
that TdA “has emerged as a significant threat to the United
States.” 

 The proclamation determined that the Venezuelan
government, acting through TdA, uses “illegal narcotics as a
weapon to ‘flood’ the United States.” 

 Based on these
findings, the President determined that TdA, “at the direction”
of Venezuela, is engaged in “an invasion or predatory incursion
against the territory of the United States.” 

. And
he therefore proclaimed that Venezuelan citizens who are
members of TdA, at least 14 years old, present in the United
States, and neither naturalized nor lawful permanent residents
are “liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed
as Alien Enemies.” 

 (citing AEA). Finally, the President
directed the Attorney General and the Secretary of Homeland
Security to apprehend, detain, and remove all such aliens. 

                                  5
The proclamation was published one day after its issuance, on
Saturday, March 15.

     The Executive Branch moved quickly and forcefully to
implement this proclamation. Before the President signed it,
the government began apprehending and interviewing
suspected TdA members. The government moved some of
them to the El Valle Detention Facility in Raymondville,
Texas, about 40 miles from our southern border. The
government also arranged to immediately remove more than
100 of these detainees from the United States and to transfer
physical custody over them to the government of El Salvador.
According to evidence credited by the district court, two flights
carrying these detainees took off from an airport near El Valle
around 5:25 P.M. and 5:45 P.M. on March 15. The flights
landed at a Honduran military base and remained there for
several hours. Then, the flights took off for El Salvador and
landed there shortly after midnight on Sunday, March 16.
Awaiting the flights were hundreds of Salvadoran security
forces, dressed in full combat gear. These forces removed the
detainees from the planes and placed them on buses, which
whisked them away to a Salvadoran prison known as the
Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT). The President of El
Salvador oversaw this operation on his end.1


     1
        In a different AEA removal case, the Solicitor General
indicated that TdA members “have proven to be especially
dangerous to maintain in prolonged detention.” Suppl. Mem.
Regarding Emergency Appl. at 3, A.A.R.P. v. Trump, No. 24A1007
(U.S. May 12, 2025). Some of them “recently barricaded themselves
in a housing unit for several hours and threatened to take hostages
and harm ICE officers.” 

 And transferring them to other facilities
“creates ongoing risks of prison recruitment and expansion of” TdA
gang activities within the United States. 

 Given these facts, it is
unsurprising that the government moved expeditiously.
                                 6
                                 B

     While the Executive Branch worked feverishly to
accomplish these AEA removals, lawyers for the suspected
TdA members worked feverishly to stop them. Shortly after
1:00 A.M. on March 15, they filed suit in the District Court for
the District of Columbia. The named plaintiffs were five
individuals detained in Texas at El Valle. The named
defendants included the President, the Secretary of State, the
Attorney General, the Secretary of Homeland Security, and the
Acting Director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The complaint alleged that the AEA did not authorize the
proclamation, which also allegedly violated the Immigration
and Nationality Act, the Convention Against Torture, the Due
Process Clause, and the Suspension Clause. The complaint
invoked causes of action under the federal habeas corpus
statute, the Administrative Procedure Act, and principles of
nonstatutory review. It also sought class certification and a
TRO. The complaint took no issue with the President’s
description of TdA as a terrorist organization posing a
substantial threat to national security. However, the complaint
disputed that TdA was conducting a predatory incursion on
behalf of Venezuela, and it alleged that none of the named
plaintiffs were TdA members.

     Over the course of the day, litigation proceeded on an
emergency basis. At 9:40 A.M., the district court entered an ex
parte TRO stating that the government “shall not remove any
of the individual Plaintiffs from the United States for 14 days.”
Minute Order (Mar. 15, 2025) (First Minute Order).2
Apparently, the government had already placed some of the
named plaintiffs on airplanes, but it returned them to the

    2
       Unless otherwise indicated, all docket citations are to J.G.G.
v. Trump, No. 25-cv-766.
                               7
detention facility after learning of the TRO. The government
continues to detain these five individuals within the United
States, so there is no allegation that it has violated this TRO.

     Given the likelihood of imminent removal flights, the
district court scheduled a videoconference hearing for 5:00
P.M. to consider further interim relief. At that hearing, the
court dismissed the habeas claims without prejudice and
provisionally certified a class of aliens held by the United
States and subject to the proclamation. At about 6:45 P.M., the
court decided to issue a second TRO despite acknowledging
“hard” and “close” questions whether disputes under the AEA
are justiciable. Tr. of Mot. Hr’g 41, Dkt. No. 20 (Mar. 16,
2025) (“Tr.”).3 After the court announced that a second TRO
would be appropriate “to prevent the removal of the class for
14 days,” it promised to “issue a minute order memorializing
this so you don’t have to race to write it down.” 

. The
court then told government counsel:

    [Y]ou shall inform your clients of this immediately,
    and that any plane containing these folks that is going
    to take off or is in the air needs to be returned to the
    United States, but those people need to be returned to
    the United States. However that’s accomplished,
    whether turning around a plane or not embarking
    anyone on the plane or those people covered by this
    on the plane, I leave to you. But this is something that
    you need to make sure is complied with immediately.

. At approximately 7:25 P.M., the court followed up
with a written minute order prohibiting the government “from
removing members of such class (not otherwise subject to

    3
       Although this hearing occurred on March 15, the transcript
was not available or docketed until March 16.
                                8
removal) pursuant to the Proclamation for 14 days or until
further Order of the Court.” Minute Order (Mar. 15, 2025)
(Second Minute Order). After this TRO was entered, no more
planes departed to carry out removals based on the
proclamation. The court later extended both TROs by 14 days.

     The government appealed and sought a stay of the TROs.
This Court denied relief, but the Supreme Court vacated the
TROs. Trump v. J.G.G., 

 (2025) (per curiam).
It concluded that, because the plaintiffs had in substance raised
“core” habeas claims, “jurisdiction lies in only one district: the
district of confinement.” 

 at 1005–06 (quoting Rumsfeld v.
Padilla, 

 (2004)). For the named plaintiffs,
that was the Southern District of Texas. See id. at 1006.

     Since the Supreme Court’s decision, alleged TdA
members have continued to seek relief. Individuals currently
detained in the United States have filed habeas actions in the
districts where they are confined, and courts have afforded
temporary relief to putative classes. See, e.g., A.A.R.P. v.
Trump, 

 (2025) (per curiam) (A.A.R.P. II).
Moreover, the plaintiffs in this case have filed an amended
complaint raising habeas and due-process claims on behalf of
the individuals who were removed and transferred to CECOT.
In considering that complaint, the district court held that habeas
jurisdiction would lie if the United States had “constructive
custody” over the detainees—in other words, if El Salvador
were holding the detainees “at the behest and ongoing
supervision” of the United States. Order at 2, Dkt. No. 116
(May 8, 2025) (quoting Abu Ali v. Ashcroft, 

 (D.D.C. 2004)). After jurisdictional discovery revealed
no such constructive custody, the court nonetheless enjoined
the government to “facilitate” the ability of the CECOT
detainees to file habeas petitions. Mem. Op. at 64–67, Dkt. No.
                               9
148 (June 4, 2025) (Second Mem. Op.). The propriety of that
injunction is not presently before us.

                               C

     In response to the March 15 removals, the district court has
begun criminal-contempt proceedings. On April 16, the court
issued an order finding probable cause that yet-unnamed
government officials committed criminal contempt by willfully
defying the court’s second minute order. The court concluded
that the Supreme Court’s vacatur of that order does not bar the
imposition of criminal sanctions. The court reasoned that an
injunction can support criminal contempt even if the court
lacked jurisdiction to enter it, because parties must obey even
void judicial orders unless and until they are reversed on
appeal. Mem. Op. at 17–20, Dkt. No. 81 (Apr. 16, 2025)
(Mem. Op.). Alternatively, the district court reasoned, it had
jurisdiction because the Supreme Court vacated the TRO only
for improper venue and no cause of action. 

 at 20–21. On
the merits, the court held that the TRO had unambiguously
prohibited the government from “relinquishing custody” over
the detainees “into the hands of a foreign government,” which
occurred several hours after the TRO was entered. Id. at 24.
The court offered to stand down if the defendants “choose to
purge their contempt” by “asserting custody” over the
individuals transferred to CECOT, “so that they might avail
themselves of their right to challenge their removability
through a habeas proceeding.” Id. at 43–44. Otherwise, the
court said that it “will proceed to identify” which government
officials, with knowledge of the TRO, “made the decision not
to halt the transfer of class members out of U.S. custody on
March 15 and 16, 2025.” Id. at 44; Order at 1, Dkt. No. 80
(Apr. 16, 2025). The court promised a criminal prosecution of
those individuals, either by the Executive Branch or, if
necessary, by a private attorney appointed by the district court.
                               10
Mem. Op. at 44 (“If the Government declines [to prosecute] or
the interest of justice requires, the Court will appoint another
attorney to prosecute the contempt.” (cleaned up)).

    The government appealed the probable-cause order and
moved for an emergency stay or a writ of mandamus
terminating the criminal-contempt proceeding. The plaintiffs
moved to dismiss the appeal. This Court granted an
administrative stay pending consideration of these motions.

                               D

    While these motions were pending, El Salvador released
the class members from CECOT and transferred them to
Venezuela as part of a prisoner exchange.

                               II

      The show-cause order is not presently appealable. It is not
a final decision appealable under the literal terms of 

, see Catlin v. United States, 

 (1945);
it is not an injunction immediately appealable under 

(a)(1), see Carson v. Am. Brands, Inc., 

, 83–
84 (1981); and it does not conclusively resolve any discrete
issue collateral to the merits of the case, so as to trigger the
collateral-order doctrine, see Cohen v. Beneficial Indus. Loan
Corp., 

 (1949). So, I focus on mandamus.

     The All Writs Act authorizes federal courts to issue “all
writs necessary or appropriate in aid of their respective
jurisdictions and agreeable to the usages and principles of law.”

(a). These writs include mandamus, for
which “three conditions must be satisfied”: (1) the petitioner
must have a “clear and indisputable” right to relief, (2) the
petitioner must have “no other adequate means to attain the
relief he desires,” and (3) issuance of the writ must be
                               11
“appropriate” under the circumstances. Cheney v. U.S. Dist.
Ct. for D.C., 

, 380–81 (2004) (cleaned up). The
first requirement “is substantially informed by our
consideration of the merits,” so mandamus cases often start
with that question. United States v. Fokker Servs. B.V., 

 (D.C. Cir. 2016); see In re Kellogg Brown &
Root, Inc., 

, 757–60 (D.C. Cir. 2014).

     The government presents three arguments in support of
mandamus. First, the show-cause order unconstitutionally
pressures the Executive Branch to engage in sensitive foreign-
policy negotiations. Second, a court cannot constitutionally
appoint a private attorney to prosecute members of the
Executive Branch. Third, the TRO was not clear enough to
support criminal contempt. Another objection, although not
presently advanced here, lurks in the background—that an
injunction entered without jurisdiction cannot support criminal
contempt. As explained below, the government has a clear and
indisputable right to relief because the TRO was insufficiently
clear to support criminal contempt. And the other points raise
difficult questions placing the Executive and Judicial Branches
into substantial conflict, which cinches up the case for granting
relief now rather than waiting for a final-judgment appeal.

                               III

     On the merits, the probable-cause finding rests on an
asserted violation of the second TRO entered by the district
court on March 15. It reads: “The Government is ENJOINED
from removing members of [the] class (not otherwise subject
to removal) pursuant to the Proclamation for 14 days or until
further Order of the Court.” Second Minute Order. The docket
text did not explain what constituted “removing” class
members. As the district court later recounted, one possible
reading is that the TRO simply prohibited the government
                               12
“from transporting class members outside of U.S. territory”—
i.e., from physically expelling them from the country. Mem.
Op. at 23. On that interpretation, the government did not
violate the TRO, for it is undisputed that the removal flights at
issue—which departed south Texas around 5:25 P.M. and 5:45
P.M.—were well outside United States airspace when the
second TRO issued around 7:25 P.M (and, for that matter,
when the oral command issued around 6:45 P.M.). However,
the TRO also could be read to have prohibited the government
from “relinquishing custody” over the detainees “into the hands
of a foreign government.” Id. at 24. And the government
relinquished physical custody over the detainees to Salvadoran
authorities in the early morning of March 16—several hours
after the TRO had issued. Whether the government violated
the TRO thus turns on a question about what constituted
“removing” the suspected TdA members.

     A strong interpretive presumption governs this analysis.
In the context of criminal contempt, ambiguity in the
underlying injunction must be resolved in favor of the alleged
contemnor. This Court has stressed that, for criminal contempt,
the injunction must be “clear and reasonably specific” in its
application to the conduct at issue. United States v. Young, 

 (D.C. Cir. 1997) (quoting United States v.
NYNEX Corp., 

 (D.C. Cir. 1993)); see United
States ex rel. Yelverton v. Fed. Ins. Co., 

(D.C. Cir. 2016) (courts “resolve omissions or ambiguities in
the order in favor of the enjoined party” (quoting C. Wright &
A. Miller, 11A Federal Practice & Procedure § 2955 (3d ed.
2013) (cleaned up))). Other circuits agree: The “long-
standing, salutary rule in contempt cases is that ambiguities and
omissions in orders redound to the benefit of the person
charged with contempt.” Ford v. Kammerer, 

 (3d Cir. 1971) (per curiam). And it is “settled law that
contempt will not lie for violation of an order of the court
                               13
unless the order is clear and decisive and contains no doubt
about what it requires to be done.” United States v. Joyce, 

 (7th Cir. 1974). These principles track the rule
of lenity that applies in all criminal cases. See, e.g., United
States v. Santos, 

 (2008). Yet they are even
more important in the specific context of contempt, where a
single judge undertakes to set the governing rule, prosecute its
alleged violation, adjudicate liability, and then impose
punishment. For as the Supreme Court has warned, this “fusion
of legislative, executive, and judicial powers summons forth
the prospect of the most tyrannical licentiousness.” Int’l
Union, United Mine Workers of Am. v. Bagwell, 

 (1994) (cleaned up).

                               A

     Plain language, legal context, and the Court’s first TRO all
support the government’s narrower reading of the second TRO
as keyed to physical expulsion from United States territory.

     Start with the ordinary meaning of the term removing. Lay
dictionaries define “remove” to mean “[t]o make (a person)
leave a place; to compel (a person or a people) by law to move
to another place.” Remove, Oxford English Dictionary, sense
3.b (Mar. 2025), https://www.oed.com/dictionary/remove_v.
And for decades, legal dictionaries have defined “removal” to
mean “[t]he transfer or moving of a person or thing from one
location, position, or residence to another.” Removal, Black’s
Law Dictionary (12th ed. 2024); see Removal, Ballentine’s
Law Dictionary 1090 (3d ed. 1969) (“a moving of something”);
Remove, Bouvier’s Law Dictionary 2880 (3d ed. 1914) (“To
change place in any manner, to go from one place to another”).
These definitions clearly connote physical displacement from
one location to another—here, movement away from the
United States and to another country. They do not clearly
                                14
connote anything about custody. Nor do they connote any
specific action by the destination country, such as legal
admittance or assumption of custody.

      Statutory context reinforces this understanding. This case
involves removals under the Alien Enemies Act, which applies
only in wartime or if a foreign nation has threatened a predatory
incursion “against the territory of the United States.” 

. In that context, the AEA gives the President an
emergency power to ensure that citizens of the offending
government are “apprehended, restrained, secured, and
removed.” 

 Moreover, the AEA repeatedly ties removal to
physical expulsion. It allows courts to order aliens subject to
an AEA proclamation “to be removed out of the territory of the
United States.” 

 § 23. And it requires marshals to “caus[e]
a removal of such alien[s] out of the territory of the United
States.” Id. § 24. A companion statute to the AEA likewise
tied removal to physical expulsion: The Alien Friends Act
allowed the President “to order to be removed out of the
territory” aliens he deemed dangerous to the public safety. Act
of June 25, 1798, ch. 58, 

, 571; see also 

 (President
may order aliens “to depart out of the territory of the United
States”). This statutory focus on physical expulsion makes
particular sense given the AEA’s purpose as a national-security
tool during times of hostility. As this Court explained long ago,
expulsion under the AEA involves the government’s ability “to
rid itself of enemies within its borders” during times of conflict,
“whether the individuals be actually hostile or merely
potentially so.” Citizens Protective League v. Clark, 

 (D.C. Cir. 1946). If the United States were at war
with a neighboring country, would its power to remove citizens
                              15
of that country really depend on that country’s agreeing to take
them back or to assume custody over them?

     The Immigration and Nationality Act likewise supports an
understanding of removal to mean the physical expulsion of an
alien from the United States—regardless of any admission or
detention decision by the country on the receiving end. The
INA specifically provides that “any alien ordered deported or
removed … who has left the United States, shall be considered
to have been deported or removed in pursuance of law.” 

(g). Applying section 1101(g), courts have held
that removal under the INA is accomplished when the alien has
“briefly departed the United States.” Nicusor-Remus v.
Sessions, 

 (9th Cir. 2018); see United States
v. Sanchez, 

 (7th Cir. 2010). These cases
reject the proposition that removal requires a “legal departure”
involving acceptance by the receiving country. See Nicusor-
Remus, 

 (“the statute makes no distinction
between physical and legal departures” (cleaned up)). To be
sure, the INA regulates the manner of removal, by restricting
the countries to which an alien may lawfully be removed. 

(b). But the removal itself does not hinge on
admission or assumption of custody by the receiving country.
Sometimes, the removal can lawfully occur without either. See
Jama v. ICE, 

 (2005). Sometimes the
removal can occur without any government taking the alien
into custody at all. See, e.g., United States v. Ramirez-
Carcamo, 

, 387–89 (5th Cir. 2009). And removal
in an unlawful manner—for instance, by taking an alien to the
wrong country—does not affect whether the removal itself was
executed. See Sanchez, 604 F.3d at 356–57. Indeed, an alien
would be removed from the United States (albeit not lawfully)
if the government effected the removal “by sailing her out to
                               16
the boundary of the territorial waters of the United States and
tossing her overboard.” Id. at 359.

     The district court brushed aside this INA precedent based
on the government’s litigating position in a different case. In a
challenge to its authority to detain removable aliens outside the
United States, the government stated that “[t]o effectuate a
departure or removal, the alien must lawfully enter another
country.” Mem. in Opp’n to Mot. to Stay at 30, Escalona v.
Noem, No. 25-cv-604, Dkt. No. 14 (D.D.C. Mar. 10, 2025)
(Escalona Opp’n). The government cited the district-court
decision in Handa v. Crawford, 

 (W.D.
Wash. 2004), aff’d sub nom. Handa v. Clark, 

(9th Cir. 2005), which held that an alien had not “legally
departed” the United States when he was denied admission into
Canada at a border crossing, drove his car “around the
Canadian flag pole” at the border, and returned immediately to
the United States. Id. at 1373. But in Nicusor-Remus, the
Ninth Circuit expressly limited Handa to its facts. See 902
F.3d at 899–900. The Court held that Handa had recognized
only a de minimis “exception” to the general “rule” that a “brief
departure” from the United States qualifies as a removal. Id. at
899. In doing so, the Court stressed that the alien in Handa had
made a “physical entry into Canada for a few seconds” only,
when Canadian officials stopped him at the border and turned
him around. Id. (quoting Handa, 

). In short,
the government’s account of removal in this case finds more
support in the caselaw than does its litigating position in
Escalona. And to the extent decisions like Handa may slightly
complicate the territorial focus of removal under the INA, that
                                17
only highlights that the term does not connote a transfer of
custody with any degree of clarity at all.4

      Finally, consider the March 15 TROs together. Both were
entered to prevent removal of suspected TdA members—the
first one for the five named plaintiffs, the second for all other
members of the putative class. The first TRO provided that the
government “shall not remove any of the individual Plaintiffs
from the United States for 14 days.” First Minute Order. The
second TRO enjoined the government from “removing” class
members “pursuant to the Proclamation for 14 days.” Second
Minute Order. The first order was expressly territorial in focus.
The second order, referencing neither territory nor custody,
was less precise. But there is no reason to think that removing
under the second TRO meant something different from remove
under the first. And there is certainly no reason to think that
the protection afforded to absent class members under the
second TRO exceeded the protection afforded to named
plaintiffs under the first—i.e., that although the first TRO
protected named plaintiffs only until departure from United
States territory, the second TRO protected absent putative class
members up until the transfer of custody.

                                 B

     To construe the TRO, the district court looked primarily to
the oral hearing. In construing injunctions, courts may look to

    4
        The government’s litigating position in Escalona seems to
reflect a concern that, if a removal is complete upon physical
departure, the government might lack authority to continue detaining
aliens while they remain en route to their ultimate destination.
Escalona Opp’n at 27–29. But the government may take acts it
“deems necessary for carrying out [its] authority” under the INA, 

(a)(3), which includes moving aliens to specific
countries selected under section 1231(b).
                               18
the “context” in which they were entered. See Young, 107 F.3d
at 907–08. Such context includes “the relief sought by the
moving party, the evidence produced at the hearing on the
injunction, and the mischief that the injunction seeks to
prevent.” Common Cause v. NRC, 

, 927 (D.C.
Cir. 1982) (cleaned up). Nonetheless, caution is appropriate.
For one thing, we should not “dissect the sentences” spoken in
oral hearings as if they were statutes. See St. Mary’s Honor
Ctr. v. Hicks, 

 (1992). Moreover, the
transcript of the March 15 hearing was not even available until
the next day—after the government had to decide whether to
proceed with an ongoing counter-terrorism operation on the
night of March 15, as it was unfolding internationally and in
real time. Finally, the district court reassured government
counsel that it would “memorializ[e]” its oral ruling in a written
injunction, “so you don’t have to race to write it down.” Tr. at
42. With these caveats, consider the context of the oral hearing.

   Most notably, the district court highlighted its oral
command to the government:

    [Y]ou shall inform your clients of this immediately,
    and that any plane containing these folks that is going
    to take off or is in the air needs to be returned to the
    United States, but those people need to be returned to
    the United States. However that’s accomplished,
    whether turning around a plane or not embarking
    anyone on the plane or those people covered by this
    on the plane, I leave to you. But this is something that
    you need to make sure is complied with immediately.

Tr. at 43. The court reasoned that “not embarking anyone on
the plane” actually meant not dis-embarking anyone—i.e., that
part of its oral command was “not to deplane” anyone on a
removal flight that had already landed somewhere abroad.
                                19
Mem. Op. at 30. That much makes sense, though this slight bit
of garbling does highlight the pitfalls of attempting to glean the
meaning of written legal text from transcripts purporting to
record exact turns of phrase in spoken English. Moreover, the
district court continued, the command either to “turn[] around
a plane” that was still in the air, or else “not to deplane” anyone
on a flight that had already landed, made clear that the
prohibition covered the “ultimate action” of transferring
“custody” over the detainees “into foreign hands.” 

     The district court also drew a similar inference based on
the first TRO. By its written terms, that TRO merely stated that
the government “shall not remove” the five named plaintiffs
“from the United States.” First Minute Order. Yet in the oral
hearing, the court construed that TRO to require that the named
plaintiffs, if already bound for El Salvador, would have to be
“brought back once the planes land in El Salvador.” Tr. at 5.
In its show-cause order, the court reasoned that this statement
likewise made clear that a prohibition on removal included a
requirement not to relinquish custody. Mem. Op. at 26–27.

     I read these exchanges differently. As the oral command
establishes by its terms, and the comment about the first TRO
confirms, the “ultimate action” that was orally required was to
“return[]” any detainees already outside the United States “to
the United States,” whether by turning planes around in mid-
air or by return flights with no deplaning in the interim. But
the written order excluded all of that—and for good reason.
Each of these options was problematic: First, any order to
bring suspected members of a foreign terrorist organization
into the United States would have faced an objection that the
judiciary cannot override the statutory prohibition on the
admission of such aliens. See 

(a)(3)(B)(i)(V),
(vi)(I); Kiyemba v. Obama, 

, 1025–26 (D.C. Cir.
2009), vacated, 

 (2010), reinstated on remand,
                               20

 (D.C. Cir. 2010). Second, any freestanding
order to turn planes around mid-air would have been
indefensible, akin to the single-Justice order (set aside by the
full Supreme Court within hours) for the Executive Branch to
stop bombing Cambodia during the Vietnam War. See
Holtzman v. Schlesinger, 

 (1973). Third, any
freestanding order prohibiting the government from
relinquishing custody to El Salvador of individuals already
physically present in El Salvador would have faced an
objection that courts may not enjoin the Executive Branch
“from transferring individuals detained within another
sovereign’s territory to that sovereign’s government.” Munaf
v. Geren, 

 (2008); see also 

 (“the
jurisdiction of the nation within its own territory is necessarily
exclusive and absolute” (quoting Schooner Exchange v.
McFaddon, 

 (1812) (Marshall,
C.J.))). To be sure, Munaf involved the transfer of an American
citizen for criminal prosecution, but there is no reason to think
that a different result would apply to the transfer of aliens for
preventive detention authorized by the laws of the receiving
sovereign. Indeed, in finding that the United States had no
constructive custody over detainees at CECOT, the district
court itself stressed that El Salvador had “chosen” to detain the
plaintiffs “for reasons far outside the ken of a federal district
court.” Second Mem. Op. at 24.

     In its show-cause order, the district court itself disclaimed
two of these three commands referenced in its oral order. It
stressed that it had never imposed any freestanding requirement
to turn planes around. Mem. Op. at 36–37. And it repeatedly
denied having imposed any overarching requirement to return
suspected TdA members to the United States. See, e.g., id. at
37 (“The fair reading of the TRO is that it only prevented class
members’ transfer from American into foreign custody.”); id.
(“And if the Government indeed voluntarily delivered nine
                                   21
passengers back to U.S. soil, the choice to hold them in the
United States as opposed to somewhere else was the
Government’s, not this Court’s.” (cleaned up)). Judge Pillard
suggests that the district court never backed away from its oral
commands. Post at 35–36. But at the TRO hearing, the court
expressly required that class members already expelled from
the United States “need to be returned to the United States.”
Tr. at 43. And that statement cannot be reconciled with its later
statement, in the show-cause order, that the TRO had “only”
prevented a “transfer from American into foreign custody.”
Mem. Op. at 37.5

     What does all of this mean for construing the TROs? Put
aside the question whether an oral injunction can ever be
binding, despite some authority that it cannot. See, e.g., Hisps.
United of DuPage Cnty. v. Village of Addison, 

,
620–21 (7th Cir. 2001) (Easterbrook, J.); Landmark Legal
Found. v. EPA, 

 (D.D.C. 2003) (citing
Bates v. Johnson, 

 (7th Cir. 1990)). At a
minimum, when an injunction is supported by “both oral and
written statements on the same matter,” courts must focus on
the latter. Playmakers LLC v. ESPN, Inc., 

(9th Cir. 2004). For one thing, Federal Rule of Civil Procedure

     5
        Judge Pillard flags documents showing that one Department
of Justice attorney advised client agencies in real time that the district
court had orally required that “anyone in the air should be returned
to the United States” and that detainees “on the ground in El
Salvador” should not be “disembarked.” Post at 12 n.1. These
documents have at best limited relevance to the ambiguity question,
which turns on an objective rather than a subjective standard. Young,

. In any event, although the DOJ lawyer correctly
relayed the terms of the oral command, none of those terms appeared
in the final, written TRO. And, again, the ultimate command to
return detainees to the United States was precisely what the district
court later denied ever having imposed.
                              22
65(d) “contemplates the issuance of a written order” to ensure
“that the litigants receive explicit notice of precisely what
conduct is outlawed.” Lau v. Meddaugh, 

(2d Cir. 2000). Moreover, from the time between statements
in an oral hearing and the actual issuance of a written
injunction, the district court might simply make adjustments.
See Playmakers, 

 (citing Ellison v. Shell Oil
Co., 

 (9th Cir. 1989)). By the time of its
show-cause order, the court here had changed its mind about
the oral command to bring back to the United States any
suspected TdA members who had already been physically
expelled. Likewise, it strongly disclaimed having imposed any
subsidiary obligation to turn planes around mid-flight. Given
all of this, the oral prohibition on “[dis]embarking” from
airplanes on the ground in El Salvador—which was never
reduced to writing, was subsidiary to the abandoned oral
command to return individuals to the United States, and was
related to the disclaimed statement about turning around
airplanes—does not count for much. Judge Pillard responds
that the oral commands were striking in their “clarity.” Post at
22. Perhaps so, but that makes all the more striking their
wholesale omission from the final written order, particularly
when the district court had promised to issue a written order
“memorializing” all of the operative commands. Tr. at 42.

     The district court further referenced the “recurring
discussion about when and how the Court would lose equitable
jurisdiction,” which it described as the harm against which the
TRO was designed to protect. Mem. Op. at 27. The relevant
passages are equivocal. Two of them suggest that the court’s
underlying concern was transfer of physical custody to a
foreign sovereign. Tr. at 35 (“the argument in part is these
folks are going to be sent to Salvadoran or Honduran prisons”);
id. at 44 (“if planes have already landed and discharged their
occupants … I don’t have jurisdiction to require their return”).
                               23
But a third suggests that the underlying concern arose from the
aliens’ mere physical expulsion from the United States. Id. at
36 (“I mean, once they are out of the country, I’m not sure what
I can do there.”). Moreover, the authorities cited by the district
court much later, with the luxury of time to parse extant
caselaw and transcripts, do not reveal any easy answer to the
question of when the court would have become unable to afford
effective relief. See Mem. Op. at 28. One of the cited cases
suggests that the court could not have afforded relief even
before the transfer of physical custody to Salvadoran officials
in El Salvador. See Munaf, 553 U.S. at 692–700. But another
suggests that the court could have afforded relief even after
such a transfer. See Abu Ali, 350 F. Supp. 2d at 45–51. None
of this unambiguously resolves whether the prohibited
“removing” turned on a custodial or territorial standard.

     One final contextual consideration involves the relief
sought by the plaintiffs, who asked the court to enter a two-
paragraph TRO. Paragraph 1 of the proposed TRO would have
ordered the government “not to remove” members of the
putative class under the AEA. [Proposed] Temporary
Restraining Order 1, Dkt. No. 3-9 (Mar. 15, 2025). Paragraph
2 would have further provided that, if there were class members
who had “already been removed from the United States”
pursuant to the AEA, then “such individuals shall be returned
to the United States.” Id. at 2. Yet despite having that proposed
order to consider over the course of the day, the district court
entered a minute order simply prohibiting “removing.” So at a
minimum, the contextual clues cut in both directions.

                                C

     Taking a step back from the specific arguments pro and
con, consider the larger picture. The government’s arguments
for a territory-based interpretation of the TRO rest on written,
                               24
conventional, and publicly available sources for construing that
binding legal text—ordinary dictionary meanings, legal usage
in governing or related statutes, and the court’s own usage in a
related, earlier TRO. Judge Pillard objects that these sources
are “orthogonal” if not irrelevant to the question presented.
Post at 34. But this case involved challenges to the removal of
aliens through the AEA, drawing an objection that the removals
had to proceed through the INA. And the district court simply
barred “removing” the aliens. In construing that order, where
else would one begin other than by considering what removal
means in ordinary usage, under the AEA, and under the INA?
Text matters, as does its linguistic and legal context. In
contrast, the competing arguments for a custody-based
interpretation rest on generalized appeals to the purpose of the
TRO, as well as fine parsing of the court’s statements at an oral
hearing—the transcript for which was unavailable until after
the assertedly contemptuous acts had already occurred, and the
substance of which the district court never reduced to writing
and later disclaimed in significant part.

     For purposes of criminal contempt, this more than suffices
to show that the TRO was ambiguous.

                               IV

     Back to mandamus standards. As explained above, they
turn on whether the government’s right to relief is clear and
indisputable, whether it has no adequate alternative means for
obtaining relief, and whether granting the writ would be
appropriate under the circumstances. See Cheney, 542 U.S. at
380–81. The answer to all three questions is yes.

                               A

    The first consideration parallels the merits. Instead of
determining whether the government’s legal position is correct,
                               25
we must determine whether it is “clear and indisputable.”
Cheney, 

 (quoting Kerr v. U.S. Dist. Ct. for the
N. Dist. of Cal., 

 (1976)). After a full-blown
assessment of the merits, this determination is often
straightforward enough. See Fokker Servs., 818 F.3d at 749–
50; Kellogg Brown & Root, 

.

     For reasons explained above, the government’s position on
the merits is clear and indisputable. This is not to suggest that
its territory-based interpretation of the TRO is clearly and
indisputably correct; there is surely some force in the district
court’s broader, custody-based interpretation. But in the
criminal-contempt context, the merits question is not which
interpretation of the TRO is best. Instead, the question is what
the TRO covers after resolving any ambiguities “in favor of the
enjoined party.” Yelverton, 

 (quoting C. Wright
& A. Miller, supra, § 2955). And on the dispositive
interpretive question addressed above, the TRO seems to me
clearly ambiguous, which makes the imposition of criminal
contempt clearly inappropriate.

                               B

     The show-cause order is interlocutory, and mandamus
must not become a “substitute for the regular appeal process.”
Cheney, 542 U.S. at 380–81. So in addressing mandamus at
this juncture, we must consider whether the government has
any adequate means for obtaining its requested relief at a later
stage of the case, including on appeal from a final judgment.
For criminal contempt, a final judgment would be one that
imposes “specific, unavoidable penalties” on identified
government officials. Salazar ex rel. Salazar v. D.C., 

 (D.C. Cir. 2010).
                               26
                                1

     Interlocutory orders can warrant mandamus if they
“interfer[e] with a coequal branch’s ability to discharge its
constitutional responsibilities.” Cheney, 

; see
Nat’l Right to Work Legal Def. v. Richey, 

, 1243
(D.C. Cir. 1975) (“unnecessary and unseemly interference with
a coordinate branch of government”). In particular, courts have
granted mandamus to set aside interlocutory orders that
interfere with the conduct of foreign policy, Ex parte Peru, 

, 586–89 (1943); create diplomatic friction, In re
Papandreou, 

, 250–52 (D.C. Cir. 1998); or
impinge upon “[t]he Executive’s primacy in criminal charging
decisions,” Fokker Servs., 

. Immediate review
is particularly appropriate to stave off a looming “constitutional
confrontation” between the Executive and Judicial
Branches. United States v. Nixon, 

 (1974).

     In Cheney, the Supreme Court applied these principles to
set aside a discovery order directed at the Vice President and
targeting the process through which he and other senior
Executive Branch officials provided advice to the President.
See 542 U.S. at 380–82. The Court acknowledged that the
government could have obtained judicial review by asserting
privilege at later stages of the ongoing discovery. See 

 But
it held that mandamus was nonetheless appropriate because a
claim of executive privilege is an “extraordinary assertion of
power” that would needlessly place the Executive and
Judiciary “on a collision course.” 

 at 389–90 (citing Nixon,

).

     Ex parte Peru applied similar principles to stop an ongoing
in rem proceeding against a steamship owned by Peru. The
Secretary of State had undertaken to “settle claims against the
vessel by diplomatic negotiations,” 

, and had
                               27
further asserted sovereign immunity on behalf of Peru, 

. Nonetheless, the district court denied Peru’s request to
dismiss the suit on immunity grounds. 

 Rather than wait for
proceedings to run their course on appeal, the Supreme Court
granted mandamus “without requiring [Peru] to apply to the
circuit court,” in order to avoid “embarrass[ing] the executive
arm of the government in conducting foreign relations.” 

 at
587–88.

     The imposition or threat of contempt against Executive
Branch officials can further support mandamus. In Nixon v.
Sirica, 

 (D.C. Cir. 1973) (en banc), this Court
invoked mandamus to review a grand-jury subpoena served on
the President. To obtain immediate review of a subpoena, most
parties must defy it and then appeal an ensuing contempt
citation. See 

 at 707 n.21. But we afforded review through
mandamus because, “[i]n the case of the President, contempt
of a judicial order—even for the purpose of enabling a
constitutional test of the order—would be a course unseemly at
best.” Id.; see also Nixon, 

. Likewise, although
civil-contempt orders are not appealable, the Second Circuit
granted mandamus to set aside an order that held the Attorney
General in civil contempt. In re Attorney General, 

 (2d Cir. 1979) (“a contempt sanction imposed on the
Attorney General in his official capacity has greater public
importance, with separation of powers overtones, and warrants
more sensitive judicial scrutiny than such a sanction imposed
on an ordinary litigant”). And even absent contempt imposed
on a high-ranking official, the Seventh Circuit, after concluding
that the government had not filed any “objectively frivolous”
briefs in the case before it, granted mandamus to stop a court-
ordered, criminal-contempt investigation into which
supervisors in a United States Attorney’s Office had authorized
or reviewed the disputed filings. In re United States, 

, 618–20 (7th Cir. 2005) (per curiam).
                              28
                              2

     The show-cause order qualifies for mandamus under these
principles. The defendants in this action include the President
and three Cabinet secretaries. The underlying dispute arises
from the execution of a presidential order to vindicate
significant national-security and counter-terrorism interests.
Its execution involved coordinated activity among the United
States and at least two foreign sovereigns. The district court
has found probable cause that some of the involved officials—
likely including “those in closest operational proximity to the
President,” Cheney, 542 U.S. at 381—committed criminal
misconduct. And as explained below, the terms of the order
ensure multiple further constitutional conflicts between the
Executive and Judicial Branches.

     The show-cause order gives the Executive Branch an
ultimatum: Either “assert custody” over aliens outside the
United States or face a court-ordered prosecution. Mem. Op.
at 43–44. Both pathways are constitutionally fraught.

     First, the order uses the threat of criminal sanctions to
pressure the Executive Branch into asserting custody over
aliens who, in the district court’s view, were removed in
violation of the TRO. But as Judge Rao explains, post at 7–10,
the Supreme Court has vacated the TRO, so the district court
cannot seek to prospectively enforce it at all. Moreover, what
the court seeks to pressure—the assertion of custody over more
than 100 alleged alien enemies now outside the United States—
is also problematic. The Supreme Court repeatedly has
warned, often in cases involving immigration, that courts may
not intrude into foreign affairs or matters of national
security. See, e.g., Biden v. Texas, 

 (2022);
Arizona v. United States, 

 (2012); Harisiades
v. Shaughnessy, 

, 588–89 (1952). To be sure,
                              29
courts also must seek to vindicate the due-process rights of
aliens to challenge AEA removals. See A.A.R.P. II, 145 S. Ct.
at 1368. But to assert “custody” over aliens outside the country
is to assert that the Executive Branch has “the power to
produce” them to a United States court. Munaf, 

. That would seem to involve effectuating rather than just
facilitating the return of suspected TdA members already
removed under the AEA, which may cross a constitutionally
significant line. See Noem v. Abrego Garcia, 

,
1018 (2025); see also Trump v. CASA, Inc., 

,
2561 (2025) (“the Judiciary does not have unbridled authority”
to enforce the Executive’s “duty to follow the law”). For the
question whether to bring into the United States individuals
deemed enemy aliens “is vitally and intricately interwoven
with contemporaneous policies in regard to the conduct of
foreign relations, the war power, and the maintenance of a
republican form of government. Such matters are so
exclusively entrusted to the political branches of government
as to be largely immune from judicial inquiry or interference.”
Harisiades, 

. Moreover, when El Salvador was
detaining the class members, asserting custody would have
required the United States to engage in diplomacy to effect a
transfer of at least constructive custody, which the courts may
not do. See, e.g., Chicago & S. Air Lines v. Waterman S. S.
Corp., 

 (1948); Edye v. Robertson, 

 (1884); Sanchez-Espinoza v. Reagan, 

 (D.C. Cir. 1985) (Scalia, J.). And now, the court’s order
would pressure some level of engagement with a regime in
Venezuela that the United States does not recognize.
Moreover, it is unclear whether the United States even could
obtain custody over the detainees, who may wish to remain free
in Venezuela rather than be detained in the United States
pending further AEA litigation or INA removals. Judge Pillard
seeks to dismiss these concerns because the “purge”
opportunity is just one “option” that the government need not
                               30
pursue. Post at 5. That just brings us to the question of what
the show-cause order portends absent any purge.

     Absent a purge, the district court promised a court-directed
criminal prosecution. First, the court said it “will” conduct
discovery into which officials, with knowledge of the TRO,
decided to transfer custody of the detainees to El Salvador.
Mem. Op. at 44. Once those individuals have been identified,
the court said it then “will” oversee a criminal prosecution,
either by the Executive Branch or, if necessary, by a private
attorney appointed by the court. See 

 (“If the Government
declines [prosecution] … the Court will appoint another
attorney to prosecute the contempt.” (cleaned up)). After the
detainees were transferred from El Salvador to Venezuela, the
court confirmed that it “will follow up” with contempt when
and if this Court lifts the administrative stay. ECF 169 at 3.
This promised prosecution has its share of difficulties.

     For starters, discovery will likely be problematic. The
government has already asserted the state-secrets privilege to
protect certain operational details about the flights removing
alleged foreign terrorists pursuant to international agreements.
See United States v. Zubaydah, 

 (2022);
United States v. Reynolds, 

 (1953). Moreover,
to the extent the discovery touches upon communications to
formulate or give advice to the President, the presidential-
communications privilege might apply. See Cheney, 

 (citing Nixon, 

). And an invocation of
that privilege would set the Executive and Judicial Branches
needlessly “on a collision course.” See id. at 389.

    Further problems would arise once the court identified the
putative contemnors. Because courts are “not required to
exhibit a naiveté from which ordinary citizens are free,” Dep’t
of Com. v. New York, 

 (2019), one may safely
                               31
assume that the Executive Branch would decline to prosecute
itself in the circumstances of this case. Then the district court
“will” appoint a private attorney to prosecute the Executive
Branch, Mem. Op. at 44, which presents its own difficulties.
The Supreme Court has held that courts “possess inherent
authority to initiate contempt proceedings for disobedience to
their orders, authority which necessarily encompasses the
ability to appoint a private attorney to prosecute the contempt.”
Young v. United States ex rel. Vuitton et Fils S.A., 

 (1987). But that holding is hard to reconcile with that
Court’s more recent insistence that “[t]he Executive Branch—
not the Judiciary—makes arrests and prosecutes offenses on
behalf of the United States.” United States v. Texas, 

, 678–79 (2023); see also Donziger v. United States, 

, 868–70 (2023) (Gorsuch, J., dissenting from denial of
certiorari). In any event, Young itself acknowledged that the
prosecutor must be “disinterested,” and decisions regarding the
prosecution must therefore be “all made outside the supervision
of the court.” 

. But then who would supervise
such a prosecutor? If nobody did, the prosecutor would be an
unconstitutionally appointed principal officer. See United
States v. Arthrex, Inc., 

, 18–19 (2021); United States
v. Donziger, 

 (2d Cir. 2022). And if court-
appointed prosecutors must be subject to supervision by the
Attorney General, as the Second Circuit held in Donziger, see
38 F.4th at 299–300, then the private-prosecutor route will be
as futile as it is provocative.

     Finally, the district court has committed to punish the
Executive Branch for violating an order that it lacked
jurisdiction to enter. The Supreme Court vacated that order
because the claims raised by these plaintiffs, however styled,
fell “within the ‘core’ of the writ of habeas corpus.” J.G.G.,
145 S. Ct. at 1005; see Rooney v. Sec’y of Army, 

 (D.C. Cir. 2005); Monk v. Sec’y of Navy, 

,
                               32
366 (D.C. Cir. 1986). Accordingly, the proper respondent to
sue was the detainees’ immediate custodian—i.e., the head of
the El Valle Detention Facility, not “some other remote
supervisory official” like a Cabinet secretary. See Padilla, 

. And the proper district in which to sue was the
Southern District of Texas, not the District of Columbia. See

 (“for core habeas petitions challenging present
physical confinement, jurisdiction lies in only one district: the
district of confinement”). The Supreme Court has been unclear
whether these rules reflect considerations of personal
jurisdiction or venue. See 

 (Kennedy, J, concurring).
Nonetheless, we have treated them as rules of personal
jurisdiction. See Stokes v. U.S. Parole Comm’n, 

, 1237–40 (D.C. Cir. 2004); Rooney, 

.
The government did not press this objection as a ground for
mandamus. But the government did raise and prevail on this
jurisdictional argument in the underlying case, so it would
remain live in any contempt prosecution going forward.

     The impact of jurisdictional defects in subsequent
criminal-contempt proceedings is unclear. Many cases hold
that a court may not impose criminal contempt for violation of
an order that it lacked jurisdiction to enter. The Supreme Court
explained: “When … a court of the United States undertakes,
by its process of contempt, to punish a man for refusing to
comply with an order which that court had no authority to
make, the order itself, being without jurisdiction, is void, and
the order punishing for the contempt is equally void.” Ex parte
Fisk, 

 (1885); see, e.g., Ex parte Burrus, 

 (1890); In re Sawyer, 

, 221–22
(1888); Ex parte Ayers, 

 (1887); Ex parte
Rowland, 

, 612–13 (1881). Two subsequent cases
arguably weakened this rule, though neither purported to
overrule these precedents. United States v. United Mine
Workers of Am., 

, 289–95 (1947); United States v.
                               33
Shipp, 

, 573–75 (1906). Accordingly, as late as
1991, several circuits still recognized the traditional rule. See,
e.g., In re Novak, 

 (11th Cir. 1991); In re
Establishment Inspection of Hern Iron Works, Inc., 

, 726–27 (9th Cir. 1989). In rejecting this view, the district
court rested primarily on Willy v. Coastal Corporation, 

 (1992), which held that courts may impose Rule 11
sanctions even in cases where they lack subject-matter
jurisdiction. See 

 at 137–39; Mem. Op. at 19–20. But in
Willy, the Supreme Court reasoned that sanctions are collateral
to the merits, so judges may require “those practicing before
the courts to conduct themselves in compliance with the
applicable procedural rules” while a case remains pending. 

. This rationale has no obvious application to
injunctions restricting the primary conduct of parties outside of
court, as opposed to the secondary conduct of parties in
litigation. Indeed, the matter at issue in Willy—a monetary
sanction of counsel’s “careless pleading,” 

 at 133—is
leagues apart from an injunction restricting the Executive
Branch from carrying out a significant, cross-border, national-
security operation.

     In sum, the district court’s show-cause order would
provoke many grave conflicts between the Judicial Branch and
the Executive Branch at its highest levels. The courts should
not have to grapple unnecessarily with the difficult, contentious
issues summarized above when a straightforward and
dispositive ground of decision already is apparent. And the
Executive should not have to wait until the district court has
imposed criminal sanctions to raise that objection. In
circumstances much less fraught than this, courts have afforded
mandamus relief to resolve the dispute—and defuse the inter-
branch conflict—as quickly as possible. In such situations,
awaiting a final-judgment appeal is not an “adequate”
alternative remedy. See Cheney, 542 U.S. at 383–92.
                              34
                               C

     For essentially the same reasons, mandamus is appropriate
under the circumstances. As explained above, this Court and
the Supreme Court repeatedly have afforded review through
mandamus when a lower court has encroached on foreign-
policy, prosecutorial, or other Executive Branch prerogatives.
See, e.g., Cheney, 542 U.S. at 383–92; Peru, 318 U.S. at 587–
88; Fokker Servs., 

; Nat’l Right to Work Legal
Def., 510 F.2d at 1243; Sirica, 

 n.21. The show-
cause order does precisely that: It uses the threat of criminal
prosecution to pressure the Executive Branch to assert custody
of suspected enemy aliens outside the country, with a view to
bringing them back into the country, or else to endure a court-
directed prosecution by a court-appointed attorney presumably
not subject to the Attorney General’s control.

    Immediate review is plainly warranted.

                               V

     The district court here was placed in an enormously
difficult position. Faced with an emergency situation, it had to
digest and rule upon novel and complex issues within a matter
of hours. In that context, the court quite understandably issued
a written order that contained some ambiguity. And it quite
understandably made oral remarks that it later walked back.

     This proceeding does not concern the lawfulness of the
AEA removals made on March 15 and 16. Nor may we decide
whether the government’s aggressive implementation of the
presidential proclamation warrants praise or criticism as a
policy matter. Perhaps it should warrant more careful judicial
scrutiny in the future. Perhaps it already has. See A.A.R.P. II,
145 S. Ct. at 1367–68; A.A.R.P. v. Trump, 

(Mem.) (2025).         Regardless, the government’s initial
                            35
implementation of the proclamation clearly and indisputably
was not criminal.

     Given this analysis, I concur in the order granting the
petition for mandamus and vacating the probable-cause order.
And because no prosecution could overcome the fatal
ambiguity explained above, I would also terminate the
criminal-contempt proceeding.
     RAO, Circuit Judge, concurring: This case arises in the
midst of a high stakes clash between the Executive Branch and
a district court. In March, the President issued a proclamation
ordering the removal of members of the Venezuelan criminal
gang Tren de Aragua, a designated foreign terrorist
organization, pursuant to the Alien Enemies Act. The following
day, the government removed dozens of alleged gang members
from the United States and transferred them to the custody of
El Salvador. But while the removal was in process and after
two planes carrying the detainees had already left the United
States, the district court entered a temporary restraining order
(TRO) barring the detainees’ removal. The Supreme Court
subsequently vacated the TRO, holding the district court lacked
authority to issue it.

     Despite the Supreme Court’s decision, the district court
sought to remedy what it perceived as the Executive’s
noncompliance with the vacated TRO. Relying on its criminal
contempt authority, the court issued an order finding probable
cause that government officials willfully violated the TRO by
not turning the planes around. The order offered the
government a choice: either (1) come into compliance with the
vacated TRO, such as by asserting custody over the individuals
detained in El Salvador, or (2) identify the officials responsible
for the removals so the district court could initiate prosecutions
for criminal contempt.

    The district court’s order is a “clear abuse of discretion”
that warrants the “drastic and extraordinary remedy” of
mandamus. Cheney v. U.S. Dist. Ct. for D.C., 

 (2004) (cleaned up). When an injunction has been vacated,
as occurred here, a district court loses the authority to coerce
compliance with the order. See Dep’t of Homeland Sec. v.
D.V.D., No. 24A1153, 

, at *1 (U.S. July 3,
2025) (holding that a district court cannot use a remedial order
“to enforce an injunction that our stay rendered
unenforceable”). Punishment through criminal contempt might
                               2
still be available in these circumstances, but the district court
cannot use the threat of such punishment as a backdoor to
obtain compliance with a vacated and therefore unenforceable
TRO.

     The district court’s abuse of the contempt power is
especially egregious because contempt proceedings against
senior Executive Branch officials carry profound “separation
of power[s] overtones” that demand the most “sensitive judicial
scrutiny.” In re Att’y Gen. of U.S., 

 (2d Cir.
1979). Lacking the authority to compel obedience, the district
court nonetheless pressured the government to take custody of
alleged alien enemies held in El Salvador. This intrusion on the
President’s foreign affairs authority “constitute[s] an
unwarranted impairment of another branch in the performance
of its constitutional duties.” Cheney, 

. Because
the order exceeds the court’s authority and amounts to a clear
abuse of discretion, mandamus is appropriate.

                               I.

     The government seeks a writ of mandamus terminating
these contempt proceedings. Although mandamus is an
extraordinary remedy, the writ has long been used to prevent
“judicial usurpation of power, or a clear abuse of discretion,”
including actions that “would threaten the separation of powers
by embarrassing the executive arm of the Government.”
Cheney, 542 U.S. at 380–81 (cleaned up); see also Roche v.
Evaporated Milk Ass’n, 

 (1943) (“The
traditional use of the writ in aid of appellate jurisdiction both
at common law and in the federal courts has been to confine an
inferior court to a lawful exercise of its prescribed
jurisdiction.”). This court has previously issued the writ to
protect against unlawful encroachments on executive power
and to prevent erroneous practices from taking hold in the
                                3
lower courts. See, e.g., Cobell v. Norton, 

(D.C. Cir. 2003); In re Kellogg Brown & Root, Inc., 

, 762–63 (D.C. Cir. 2014); In re Clinton, 

(D.C. Cir. 2020).

     To determine if mandamus is appropriate, a reviewing
court first must consider whether the district court exceeded its
legal authority or abused its discretion. If so, the court must
assess whether the error is of the type that justifies mandamus.
See In re Kellogg Brown & Root, 756 F.3d at 756–57; United
States v. Fokker Servs. B.V., 

 (D.C. Cir.
2016).

                               II.

     The government maintains that mandamus is an
appropriate remedy to the district court’s overreach. It argues
that the district court is attempting to “enforce a vacated order
by exploiting the threat of contempt,” and this approach puts
the Executive to an “extraordinary and coercive Hobson’s
choice.” Furthermore, the government contends that the district
court’s order “dangerously intrudes on core executive
prerogatives” in the conduct of foreign affairs.

     Assessing the lawfulness of this unusual order requires
properly characterizing what the district court did. The district
court claimed it was undertaking a “compliance inquiry”
because the government’s disobedience of the TRO “is
punishable as contempt.” J.G.G. v. Trump, 25-cv-766, 

, at *1 (D.D.C. Apr. 16, 2025). After applying the
standards for criminal contempt and determining there was
“probable cause” to find a willful violation of a clear order, the
district court gave the government the option of either
complying with the vacated TRO (by asserting custody of the
individuals or other similar action) or facing criminal contempt
prosecutions. 

 at *20–21.
                                4
     The purpose and effect of this preliminary order is to
compel the government to exercise its foreign affairs powers to
assert custody of the removed gang members. 

. The
district court acknowledged that it can no longer coerce this
action through civil contempt because its order was vacated by
the Supreme Court. See 

 (invoking the collateral-bar
rule, which is available only in criminal contempt). Lacking the
power to coerce the government, the district court nonetheless
sought to achieve the same result with the threat of criminal
contempt. Dangling this sword of Damocles to compel the
Executive to exercise its foreign affairs powers exceeds the
court’s authority and is an abuse of discretion.

                                A.

     The authority of the federal courts to punish for contempt
is an inherent attribute of the judicial power. See Potter v.
District of Columbia, 

 (D.C. Cir. 2025); see
also Ex parte Robinson, 

 (1874)
(“The power to punish for contempts is inherent in all courts;
its existence is essential to the preservation of order in judicial
proceedings, and to the enforcement of the judgments, orders,
and writs of the courts, and consequently to the due
administration of justice.”). Contempt proceedings come in one
of two forms: civil or criminal. Bessette v. W. B. Conkey Co.,

 (1904).

      It is well established that the “proper classification”
between civil and criminal contempt is often essential to ensure
trial courts stay within constitutional and equitable limits. See
Gompers v. Bucks Stove & Range Co., 

(1911); Int’l Union, United Mine Workers of Am. v. Bagwell,

, 830–34 (1994). When reviewing whether the
contempt power has been properly exercised, we look to “the
substance of the proceeding and the character of the relief that
                                5
the proceeding will afford,” not the label attached by the parties
or the court below. Hicks v. Feiock, 

 (1988);
see also Shillitani v. United States, 

, 369–70
(1966).

     Several key features distinguish civil from criminal
contempt. Civil contempt is an equitable device used to secure
compliance with a court order and to preserve and enforce the
rights of the parties. See In re Nevitt, 

, 458–59 (8th
Cir. 1902). Its sanctions are therefore coercive and remedial,
rather than punitive. See Shillitani, 384 U.S. at 368–70;
Gompers, 221 U.S. at 441–43. The “paradigmatic … civil
contempt sanction” is the conditional penalty that may be
“purge[d]” through compliance with the original order.
Bagwell, 

; see also Shillitani, 

(explaining the civil contemnor “carr[ies] the keys of [his]
prison in [his] own pocket[]” and can avoid the penalty by
complying) (cleaned up). Because civil contempt proceedings
are aimed at securing the benefits of the court’s order to the
prevailing party, they take place between the original parties
and are part of the underlying case. See Gompers, 221 U.S. at
444–45.

     By contrast, criminal contempt is an action at law to punish
the violation of a court order and “‘vindicate the authority of
the court’ following a transgression rather than to compel
future compliance or to aid the plaintiff.” Cobell, 

 (quoting Bagwell, 

). Whereas a coercive
civil contempt sanction is conditional and may be purged
through compliance, a criminal contempt sanction is a fixed
and “unconditional sentence for punishment or deterrence.”
Shillitani, 

 n.5.

     Although the line between them can sometimes be difficult
to draw, civil and criminal contempt are distinct. They serve
                               6
different purposes and are bounded by different procedural,
constitutional, and equitable limits. See Gompers, 

, 444–45. Recognizing these fundamental distinctions, the
Supreme Court has warned courts not to blur the line between
civil and criminal contempt when doing so would result in
“substantial prejudice” to the contemnor. United States v.
United Mine Workers of Am., 

, 300–01 (1947); see
also Gompers, 221 U.S. at 443–52 (vacating criminal contempt
sanction imposed after civil contempt proceedings because
criminal procedures were not followed and because the
underlying dispute had been settled). For instance, a court may
not use civil contempt to impose an unconditional punishment,
thereby depriving the contemnor of the constitutional
protections required for criminal contempt. See, e.g., Gompers,

; Hicks, 

.

     Civil contempt also has important limits. As relevant here,
the coercive power of civil contempt is extinguished once the
underlying order is stayed or vacated. See United Mine
Workers, 

 (“The right to remedial relief falls
with an injunction which events prove was erroneously
issued.”); D.V.D., 

, at *1. Because the power
of civil contempt is coercive and remedial, it may be exercised
only so long as there is an underlying order for the court to
enforce. Simply put, a court cannot compel compliance with an
invalid order.

                              B.

    The district court’s order is an improper use of the
contempt power. Unable to compel compliance with its vacated
order, the district court used the threat of criminal process to
coerce the government to “purge” its contempt. The
government correctly says it has been put to a Hobson’s choice:
comply with an invalid order or name Executive Branch
                                  7
officials for the initiation of criminal contempt proceedings.1
The proffered choice impermissibly commingles civil and
criminal contempt in a manner that results in substantial
prejudice to the government. Compounding this error, the
district court’s order attempts to control the Executive Branch’s
conduct of foreign affairs, an area in which a court’s power is
at its lowest ebb.

     When it became clear the government had transferred over
200 individuals into Salvadoran custody, the district court
ordered the government to show cause why it had not violated
the TRO. The proceedings that followed initially bore the
hallmarks of civil contempt. The show cause order was filed on
the same docket as the main cause and with the same case
caption. See Gompers, 221 U.S. at 444–46. Moreover, the court
solicited briefing from the plaintiffs and allowed them to
participate in a hearing on the issue. See 

 at 444–45. All of
this suggests the district court was contemplating holding the
government in civil contempt to coerce compliance with the
TRO.

     Before the district court ruled on contempt, however, the
Supreme Court intervened. The Court determined that
challenges to removal under the Alien Enemies Act fall within
the “core” of habeas corpus and therefore that “jurisdiction lies
in only one district: the district of confinement.” Trump v.
J.G.G., 

, 1005–06 (2025) (cleaned up). The

1
  It is swinging at a strawman to say that this issue was never raised
or briefed. See Dissenting Op. 42. The government maintained that
it was being put to a Hobson’s choice between compliance and
ceding control of its foreign affairs power and that the district court
was trying to enforce its vacated TRO through the threat of criminal
contempt. The legal error identified here follows directly from
arguments raised and pressed by the government.
                                  8
Court vacated the TRO because the detainees subject to the
proclamation were confined in Texas, making venue improper
in the District of Columbia. 

.

     This decision was fatal to the pending civil contempt
proceedings, as the district court, the parties, and the dissent all
seem to concede. Once the underlying order was vacated, the
district court lost the power to compel the Executive to come
into compliance with the TRO. See United Mine Workers, 330
U.S. at 294–95; Ayuda, Inc. v. Thornburgh, 

(D.C. Cir. 1991) (holding that when “the district court had no
power to determine plaintiffs’ rights … there is no longer a
basis for holding the government in civil contempt”), vacated
on other grounds, Ayuda, Inc. v. Reno, 

 (1993).

     Barred from coercing compliance, the district court issued
a highly unusual order finding “probable cause” that
government officials had committed criminal contempt.
J.G.G., 

, at *1. The court invoked the
collateral-bar rule to justify continuing with criminal contempt
proceedings notwithstanding the Supreme Court’s vacatur.2 

. The court then explained that “before initiating any
criminal-contempt proceedings, courts typically allow the
contumacious party an opportunity to purge its contempt.” 

.



2
  Under the collateral-bar rule, criminal contempt may remain
available even after an order is vacated because “[v]iolations of an
order are punishable as criminal contempt even though the order is
set aside on appeal.” United Mine Workers, 

. Of
course, a district court must still consider whether criminal contempt
is appropriate under the circumstances, taking into account the
invalidity of the underlying order and serious separation of powers
concerns. See Donovan v. City of Dallas, 

 (1964).
                                9
    It is true that while an order remains in place, the district
court may seek either to remedy non-compliance through civil
contempt or to punish non-compliance with criminal contempt.
Sometimes a court will first attempt civil contempt remedies
before criminal proceedings to afford a party one last chance to
comply before facing “more drastic criminal sanctions.” Yates
v. United States, 

 (1957). That approach is
appropriate where civil contempt remains available. But here
the TRO is invalid, and as everyone agrees, the district court
has no authority to compel compliance.

     Nonetheless, the court offered a choice aimed at securing
compliance: The government could either “purge its contempt”
and “remedy its violation by voluntarily obeying” the TRO or
face criminal prosecutions. J.G.G., 

, at *20–
21. The district court used the threat of criminal contempt to
pressure the government to exercise its foreign affairs power
and assert custody over the removed individuals.

     This approach exceeded the court’s authority and
constituted an abuse of discretion. What a court lacks the power
to do directly, it cannot accomplish indirectly. See Cummings
v. Missouri, 

 (1867) (“[W]hat cannot
be done directly cannot be done indirectly. The Constitution
deals with substance, not shadows.”); cf. Lonchar v. Thomas,

 (1996) (“[I]f the district court lacks authority
to directly dispose of the petition on the merits, it would abuse
its discretion by attempting to achieve the same result
indirectly.”). The district court had no authority to demand
compliance with the vacated TRO through civil contempt, so it
had no authority to attain the same coercive result by
threatening criminal contempt proceedings. The power to hold
defendants in criminal contempt is the power only to punish for
past violations of a court order. Having lost its civil contempt
                                   10
authority, the district court could not use the threat of a criminal
punishment to achieve compliance with the TRO.3

    The Supreme Court recently clarified that a district court
may not use contempt to “‘coerce’ the Government into
‘compliance’” with an injunction stayed by the Supreme Court.
D.V.D., 

, at *1 (quoting United Mine
Workers, 

). The Court explained that a stay
divests the district court’s order of enforceability. 

 (citing
Nken v. Holder, 

 (2009)). As Justice Kagan
emphasized, “I do not see how a district court can compel
compliance with an order that this Court has stayed.” 

(Kagan, J., concurring). The Court’s reasoning applies with
even greater force in this context, where the district court’s
TRO was not just stayed but vacated by the Supreme Court.
The district court cannot coerce compliance with an invalid and
unenforceable TRO through the threat of contempt.


3
  Judge Pillard’s primary rebuttal is that the district court was in fact
proceeding in criminal, not civil, contempt. See Dissenting Op. 42–
43. My argument, however, is not that these proceedings are civil,
but rather that the district court cannot use its criminal contempt
power to cajole and threaten the government into complying with the
vacated order. The fact that criminal contempt might be available in
these circumstances does not change the unlawfulness of the choice
put to the government.
     Judge Pillard’s secondary rebuttal—that demanding the names
of Executive officials for a criminal proceeding is not coercive—
carries even less force. See id. at 44. The district court declared its
intent to identify the responsible officials through depositions and
hearings and, if necessary, appoint its own prosecutor to bring
charges. J.G.G., 

, at *21. Judge Pillard maintains
that this is just a “standard request for information,” but calling it
such does nothing to mitigate the coercion inherent in the district
court’s stated commitment to initiate a criminal investigation.
                                   11
                                   C.

    Furthermore, the district court’s abuse of discretion is
compounded by the fact that the order intrudes on the
Executive’s foreign affairs power. The threat of criminal
contempt is directed at forcing the Executive to engage in
diplomacy to assert custody over individuals held by a foreign
sovereign.

     The district court’s directive requires diplomacy because
its “most obvious” purge option—the government “asserting
custody” over the detainees—is an outcome the Executive
cannot achieve unilaterally. J.G.G., 

, at *20.
At the time of the court’s probable cause order, the individuals
were in the custody of El Salvador. Therefore, asserting
custody would require the Executive Branch to open
negotiations and then persuade a foreign sovereign to
relinquish control.4 While the court offered to “evaluate” any
“other methods of coming into compliance,” it reserved the
ultimate power to define what constitutes a successful
diplomatic outcome. 

     The district court’s order intrudes upon the powers
committed to the Executive Branch. The Constitution entrusts
the conduct of the nation’s foreign affairs to the political
branches. The President’s foreign affairs responsibilities
include weighty matters such as “making treaties, appointing
ambassadors, recognizing foreign governments, meeting
foreign leaders, overseeing international diplomacy and


4
  Since the district court’s probable cause order, the individuals in
question have been transferred from the custody of El Salvador to
Venezuela. See Gov’t Suppl. Br. 1. While this development changes
aspects of the underlying litigation, it does not alter the fact that the
probable cause order was an abuse of discretion.
                               12
intelligence gathering, and managing matters related to
terrorism, trade, and immigration.” Trump v. United States, 

, 2327 (2024). As we have held, “the
commencement of diplomatic negotiations with a foreign
power is completely in the discretion of the President …. The
Executive is not subject to judicial control or direction in such
matters.” U.S. ex rel. Keefe v. Dulles, 

 (D.C.
Cir. 1954); see also Zivotofsky ex rel. Zivotofsky v. Kerry, 

, 13–16 (2015); United States v. Curtiss-Wright Export
Corp., 

 (1936) (recognizing the President is
the “sole organ of the federal government in the field of
international relations”).

     Decisions concerning diplomacy and foreign policy are
“of a kind for which the Judiciary has neither aptitude,
facilities[,] nor responsibility and which has long been held to
belong in the domain of political power not subject to judicial
intrusion or inquiry.” Chicago & S. Air Lines, Inc. v. Waterman
S.S. Corp., 

 (1948); see also Concurring Op.
28–29 (Katsas, J.). These separation of powers principles are
only reinforced by the Supreme Court’s recognition in this
litigation that the statute under which the removals were made,
the Alien Enemies Act, “largely ‘precludes judicial review.’”
J.G.G., 145 S. Ct. at 1005 (quoting Ludecke v. Watkins, 

, 163–64 (1948)). The judiciary should not “embarrass
the executive arm of the Government in conducting foreign
relations” by “assuming an antagonistic jurisdiction.” Ex parte
Peru, 

 (1943) (cleaned up).

     By pressuring the Executive Branch to take diplomatic
action through the threat of criminal contempt, the district
court’s order impermissibly encroaches on the Executive’s
conduct of foreign affairs.

                             ***
                                13
     “[T]he very amplitude of the [contempt] power is a
warning to use it with discretion, and a command never to exert
it where it is not necessary or proper.” Gompers, 

. After the Supreme Court vacated the TRO, the district
court no longer had authority to coerce compliance with that
order. The attempt to do so with the threat of criminal contempt
was both unlawful and a clear abuse of discretion, particularly
because the coercion was directed at the Executive’s conduct
of foreign affairs.

                               III.

     Having concluded the district court exceeded its legal
authority and abused its discretion, the next question is whether
this error justifies mandamus. See 

(authorizing courts to issue “appropriate” writs). Before issuing
a writ of mandamus, “three conditions must be satisfied: (i) the
petitioner must have ‘no other adequate means to attain the
relief he desires’; (ii) the petitioner must show that his right to
the writ is ‘clear and indisputable’; and (iii) the court ‘in the
exercise of its discretion, must be satisfied that the writ is
appropriate under the circumstances.’” Fokker Servs., 

 (quoting Cheney, 542 U.S. at 380–81). All three
conditions are satisfied here.

                                A.

     First, the government has no other adequate means to
challenge the district court’s unlawful order. Immediate appeal
is likely not available. See Concurring Op. 10 (Katsas, J.);
Dissenting Op. 17. And any post-judgment appeal would be an
inadequate form of relief because it is doubtful such review
could remedy the harm caused by the order.
    The district court’s order places the government in an
untenable position between two choices. If the government
                              14
“comes into compliance” to avoid criminal contempt for its
officials, such compliance could foreclose future appellate
review of the district court’s coercive order. Cf. Fraunhofer-
Gesellschaft zur Förderung der angewandten Forschung E.V.
v. Sirius XM Radio Inc., 

, 1322–23 (D.C. Cir.
2023) (holding compliance with an order rendered an appeal
from that order moot). Moreover, post-judgment appellate
review could not undo the intrusion on the Executive Branch
caused by pressuring the government to assert custody of the
individuals (or to take some similar action). See Cobell, 

 (finding no adequate alternative when the
government’s alleged harms included “interference with the
internal deliberations” of the government that could not “be
remedied by an appeal from the final judgment”) (cleaned up);
In re Sealed Case No. 98-3077, 

, 1065–66 (D.C.
Cir. 1998) (finding appellate review inadequate when the
government would suffer “irreparable harm” before the
appeal).
     If, on the other hand, the government refuses to come into
compliance with the district court’s directives, any appeal from
subsequent criminal contempt proceedings could not correct
the unlawful and abusive choice the district court offered here.
The harm is in the choice itself. The order forces a coequal
branch to choose between capitulating to an unlawful judicial
order and subjecting its officials to a dubious prosecution.
Mandamus is the only mechanism available to provide relief
from this unlawful order. See Fokker Servs., 

;
Maryland v. Soper, 

 (1926) (“Except by the issue
of mandamus, [the government] is without an opportunity to
invoke the decision of this Court upon the issue it would
raise.”).
    Because an appeal would come too late to undo the
constitutional injury of the court’s coercive choice, the
                                 15
government has established that it has no other adequate means
to attain relief.
                                 B.

     Second, the government’s right to the writ is clear and
indisputable. As explained above, the district court exceeded
its legal authority and abused its discretion, an error
exacerbated by the intrusion into the Executive’s power to
conduct foreign affairs. See Cheney, 

.

     This case is highly unusual, and I have found no other like
it, perhaps because no district court has threatened criminal
contempt against Executive Branch officials as a backdoor to
coercing compliance with an order that has been vacated by the
Supreme Court. Even so, “we have never required the existence
of a prior opinion addressing the precise factual
circumstances ... at issue in order to find clear error justifying
mandamus relief.”5 Fokker Servs., 818 F.3d at 749–50. In fact,
mandamus is often granted to correct judicial innovations. As
the Supreme Court has explained, appellate courts have the
power to review by mandamus “an issue of first impression” or
“to settle new and important problems.” Schlagenhauf v.
Holder, 

 (1964); see also Colonial Times,
Inc. v. Gasch, 

, 525–26 (D.C. Cir. 1975) (using
mandamus to resolve an issue of first impression that was

5
  The district court’s order is novel, but our analysis of it turns on
longstanding principles underlying the limits of the contempt power.
Judge Pillard maintains that an “open question[]” cannot justify
mandamus. Dissenting Op. 47. But she provides no response to the
Supreme Court and circuit precedents cited above, which squarely
hold that mandamus is appropriate to correct judicial innovations that
exceed the judicial power. In any event, this case does not present an
“open question” of law but rather a novel assertion of judicial power
that runs contrary to settled equitable and legal limits.
                               16
“important to the administration of discovery”); In re Att’y
Gen., 

 (using mandamus to answer “underlying
issues of first impression”).

     “[W]hen a court has no judicial power to do what it
purports to do,” such “usurpation of power” must be corrected
by a higher court. De Beers Consol. Mines, Ltd. v. United
States, 

 (1945). The district court’s order
exceeds the contempt power and intrudes on the powers of the
Executive Branch—that error is clear and of the type that
warrants mandamus.

                               C.

     Finally, the writ is appropriate in these circumstances.
“Accepted mandamus standards are broad enough to allow a
court of appeals to prevent a lower court from interfering with
a coequal branch’s ability to discharge its constitutional
responsibilities.” Cheney, 

. The district court
sought to coerce a result it has no authority to compel, and the
coercion intrudes on the Executive’s foreign affairs powers. Cf.
Biden v. Texas, 

 (2022) (explaining courts
should “take[] care to avoid ‘the danger of unwarranted judicial
interference in the conduct of foreign policy’”) (quoting Kiobel
v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co., 

 (2013)). Such
judicial interference is especially unwarranted when, as here, it
is undertaken to enforce an order the Supreme Court has
already declared invalid. When a lower court infringes on an
“action of the political arm of the Government taken within its
appropriate sphere,” the overreach must “be promptly
recognized” and corrected to prevent “the delay and
inconvenience of a prolonged litigation.” Ex parte Peru, 

.

    This court often grants mandamus to correct unlawful
encroachments on executive power, even when proceedings in
                               17
the district court have not fully run their course. For example,
in In re Cheney, we granted mandamus in the early stages of
litigation to bar the deposition of the Vice President’s Chief of
Staff because it “would constitute an unwarranted impairment
of the functioning” of the Office of the Vice President. 

 (D.C. Cir. 2008) (cleaned up). Likewise, in In re
Sealed Case No. 98-3077, we granted mandamus to vacate an
order requiring the independent counsel to produce documents,
submit to depositions, and respond to subpoenas for live
testimony, because these requirements would cause
“irreparable harm” to a pending grand jury investigation and
would “divert petitioner’s focus” away from that investigation
“at a crucial juncture.” 151 F.3d at 1065–66. And in Cobell v.
Norton, we granted mandamus when the appointment of a court
monitor “intrude[d] into the internal affairs of the Department
[of the Interior].” 

; see also Fokker Servs., 

 (finding mandamus appropriate when the district
court’s ruling would “have enormous practical consequences
for the government’s ability to negotiate future settlements”)
(cleaned up); In re Clinton, 973 F.3d at 117–21 (finding
mandamus appropriate to vacate an intrusive discovery order
directed at the former Secretary of State). Consistent with these
many examples, we issue the writ of mandamus here to correct
the district court’s “unwarranted impairment of another branch
in the performance of its constitutional duties.” Cheney, 

.

     Moreover, mandamus is appropriate to “forestall future
error in trial courts.” Colonial Times, 

. The
court’s contempt authority is uniquely “liable to abuse.” Ex
parte Terry, 

 (1888); see also Bloom v.
Illinois, 

 (1968). Accordingly, as a court of
review, we must ensure the power is not wielded to reach
“arbitrary or oppressive conclusions.” Cooke v. United States,

 (1925). Mandamus is appropriate here to
                                18
forestall courts from using criminal contempt to indirectly
coerce enforcement of an unenforceable order.

    Lastly, a word about the appropriateness of the specific
mandamus remedy we grant today. In issuing the writ, we
vacate the district court’s probable cause order, but we do not
grant the government’s request to terminate the criminal
contempt proceedings. We have before us only the district
court’s preliminary order on probable cause, an order that seeks
to use the threat of criminal contempt to coerce compliance
with a TRO vacated by the Supreme Court. Because the
immediate harm is the unlawful choice the district court
imposed, vacating the order is the appropriate and necessary
remedy.

     “Although the remedy by mandamus is at law, its
allowance is controlled by equitable principles.” United States
ex rel. Greathouse v. Dern, 

 (1933). Those
principles demand that the remedy be tailored to the specific
harm before us. Gill v. Whitford, 

 (2018).
A court’s relief “should be no more burdensome to the
defendant than necessary to provide complete relief to the
plaintiffs.” Trump v. CASA, Inc., 

, 2557 (2025)
(cleaned up); see also 

 (Thomas, J., concurring) (“In
no circumstance can a court award relief beyond that necessary
to redress the plaintiffs’ injuries.”). Here, the harm was putting
the government to an unlawful choice, and the relief must be
limited to that harm.6


6
  Vacating only the purge option would not cure the district court’s
error. Cf. Dissenting Op. 7–8. Because the district court’s two
choices are linked, eliminating the purge option would immediately
require the government to identify executive officials for
                                  19
     With the probable cause order vacated, the district court
will have to squarely face the difficult questions that would
arise from initiating criminal contempt against senior
Executive Branch officials. In this and related proceedings, the
district court’s primary focus has been securing the
government’s compliance and bringing the removed
individuals back into the government’s custody. Cf. J.G.G. v.
Trump, 25-cv-766, 

, at *14 (D.D.C. June 4,
2025) (allowing plaintiffs to bring new due process claims
notwithstanding the Supreme Court’s determination that such
challenges could be brought only in habeas and that the District
of Columbia was an improper venue). A pivot now to a purely
punitive proceeding would be a momentous decision.

     Although executive officials are not above the law and are
not “immune from punishment for contempt,” they are very
rarely held in either civil or criminal contempt. Land v. Dollar,

, 638–40 (D.C. Cir. 1951) (per curiam), vacated
as moot, Sawyer v. Dollar, 

 (1952). Indeed, I am
not aware of any case in which punishment for contempt
against a senior executive official was upheld on appeal. See,
e.g., In re Att’y Gen., 

 (vacating a contempt
finding against the Attorney General); Sawyer, 

(vacating and dismissing as moot a contempt finding against


prosecution. But the district court imposed this directive only if the
government did not accept the purge option. In light of the serious
constitutional and other concerns identified here and by Judge Katsas
in his concurrence, vacating the order in full allows the district court
to consider how to move ahead, if at all, without the purge option.
Cf. Donovan, 

 (“Whether the Texas court would have
punished petitioners for contempt had it known that the restraining
order … was invalid, we do not know. However, since that question
was neither considered nor decided by the Texas court, we leave it
for consideration by that court on remand.”).
                               20
the Secretary of Commerce). Holding Executive Branch
officials in contempt demands “more sensitive judicial scrutiny
than such a sanction imposed on an ordinary litigant” because
these officials are representatives of “another branch of
government coequal to the judicial branch in constitutional
function and design.” In re Att’y Gen., 596 F.2d at 64–65.

     Another concern is whether the district court may appoint
an independent prosecutor if the Department of Justice
declines—as one may reasonably expect—to prosecute for
criminal contempt in these circumstances. See Concurring Op.
30–31 (Katsas, J.); Dissenting Op. 24 (arguing that such
separation of powers claims are presently unripe but
acknowledging that they may be raised by the government if
an independent prosecutor is appointed in the future). I have
found no precedent for a court independently prosecuting an
Executive Branch official for criminal contempt, much less any
instance of a district court seeking criminal punishment against
an Executive Branch official for violating an order that the
Supreme Court has vacated.

     Whether to proceed with criminal contempt is a choice left
to the district court, which “enjoys a discretion akin to the non-
prosecution power in the executive.” Potter, 

.
With the issuance of this writ of mandamus, I would not
assume that such an extraordinary step is forthcoming. See
D.V.D., 

, at *1 (assuming the district court
will comply with the Supreme Court’s decision and “cease
enforc[ement]” of the stayed injunction). In any event, today
we correct the particular error before us. If the district court
chooses the problematic and uncertain path of criminal
contempt, the government may seek relief from this court to
remedy any specific harms arising from the district court’s
actions.
                               21
                              ***

     The district court used the threat of criminal contempt to
coerce the Executive Branch to comply with an order it had no
authority to enforce. And it directed that coercion toward the
Executive’s exercise of its foreign affairs power. The
significance of the district court’s error, coupled with the
potential for abuse in future cases, justifies our intervention at
this stage of the proceedings. Considering the “totality of the
circumstances,” the writ is appropriate. In re Kellogg Brown &
Root, 

.

     For the foregoing reasons, I concur in the decision to grant
the government’s petition for a writ of mandamus and to vacate
the district court’s order.
     PILLARD, Circuit Judge, dissenting: The rule of law
depends on obedience to judicial orders. Yet, shortly after the
district court granted plaintiffs’ emergency motion for a
temporary restraining order, defendants appear to have
disobeyed it. Our system of courts cannot long endure if
disappointed litigants defy court orders with impunity rather
than legally challenge them. That is why willful disobedience
of a court order is punishable as criminal contempt.

     When it appears that a judicial order has been disobeyed,
the court’s ability to learn who was responsible is the first step
to accountability. In defense of the integrity of our courts, the
district judge promptly issued an opinion describing in detail
the facts giving rise to probable cause to believe that contempt
of court had occurred. The accompanying order required only
that defendants identify the people responsible for the
apparently contumacious conduct.

    Defendants assert no claim of privilege to withhold the
identities of the decisionmakers aware of the TRO who decided
not to halt the flights carrying detainees to prison in El
Salvador. They affirm that executive branch officials can be
subject to sanction for criminal contempt. Reply in Supp. of
Stay 5-6. And they squarely deny any suggestion “that [the
executive branch] would never prosecute an official for
criminal contempt.” 

     Yet my colleagues, each for a distinct and non-overlapping
reason, vote to grant a writ of mandamus to vacate the district
court’s Order. Judge Katsas would go further and “terminate
the criminal-contempt proceeding.” Katsas Op. 35.

     They intervene in error. We all agree we lack appellate
jurisdiction. It should be even more apparent that defendants
have no clear and indisputable right to the extraordinary writ of
mandamus. Cheney v. U.S. Dist. Ct. for Dist. of Columbia, 

 (2004). The right to relief is only “clear and
                                2
indisputable” when a petitioner “can point to cases in which a
federal court has held that relief is warranted in a matter
involving like issues and comparable circumstances.” In re Al
Baluchi, 

 (D.C. Cir. 2020) (citation and
internal quotation marks omitted). Neither defendants nor my
colleagues cite to any such cases. Moreover, I am unaware of
any prior case in which a court has asserted the clarity on which
mandamus relief depends without a majority agreeing as to
what is so clear. Because the district court’s order is not
remotely one from which defendants have an indisputable right
to relief, I would deny mandamus and dismiss the appeal.

     The district court’s April 16, 2025, Order is decidedly not
a “criminal contempt order” that “unconstitutionally
commandeers” the Executive’s prosecutorial powers. Mot. for
Stay 1. Nobody contends the Order imposed punishment.
Nobody says it even made a referral to the Department of
Justice for prosecution. The Department accordingly has had
no occasion to decide whether to prosecute, nor has the district
court had reason to appoint a prosecutor to pursue contempt
charges the Department declines. And defendants’ right to
appeal any conviction—or perhaps a future order of private
prosecution—provides “other adequate means to attain the
relief” from the unconstitutional infringement of executive
prerogative that they forecast, which alone should defeat
mandamus. Cheney, 

.

     The court’s Order did only two things. First, it set an April
23, 2025, deadline for defendants to file a declaration
identifying “who, with knowledge of the Court’s classwide
Temporary Restraining Order, made the decision not to halt the
transfer of class members out of U.S. custody on March 15 and
16, 2025.” Order, J.G.G. v. Trump, No. 25-cv-766 (JEB), Dkt.
No. 80 (D.D.C. Apr. 16, 2025) [hereinafter April 16 Order].
The court correctly explained why it retains jurisdiction to
                               3
consider the potential criminal contempt even after the
Supreme Court held that venue of the plaintiffs’ individual
habeas claims is not in D.C. where defendants are, but in Texas
or wherever plaintiffs are confined. J.G.G. v. Trump, No. 25-
cv-766 (JEB), 

, at *9-10 (D.D.C. Apr. 16,
2025) (citing Trump v. J.G.G., 

 (2025)
(per curiam)). Nobody contends that the identity of the
potential contemnors is irrelevant to the potential criminal
contempt, and no immunity or privilege is asserted. Requiring
a party to produce nonprivileged information of central
relevance to a pending dispute is an entirely routine judicial
function.

    If the district court had stopped there, Judge Rao provides
no reason to grant mandamus.

     But the court’s Order gave defendants another option:
Instead of identifying the potential contemnors, defendants
could commit to rectifying the harm their apparent defiance of
the TRO inflicted on the plaintiffs. The constitutional
dimension of the harm to the plaintiff class members is beyond
dispute. Shortly after defendants rushed to transfer plaintiffs
to a Salvadoran prison in the face of TROs (that we declined to
stay in order to prevent further such removals), the Supreme
Court ruled unanimously that the Constitution guaranteed
plaintiffs’ pre-removal due process rights to dispute their
alleged role in Tren de Aragua. As the district court observed,
“[i]n holding as much, the [Supreme] Court effectively said
that the Constitution flatly prohibits the Government from
doing exactly what it did that Saturday, when it secretly loaded
people onto planes, kept many of them in the dark about their
destination, and raced to spirit them away before they could
invoke their due-process rights.” Id. at *7.
                               4
     Punishment for contempt would vindicate the authority of
the court. But the court also recognized the plaintiffs’ ongoing
peril. So, it gave defendants the option to make an alternative
April 23 filing—one that would “explain[] the steps they have
taken and will take” to remedy the effect on the plaintiffs of
their potentially contemptuous actions. April 16 Order; see
J.G.G., 

, at *20. Defendants would “not
need to release any of those individuals, nor would [they] need
to transport them back to the homeland,” but only make some
arrangement for plaintiffs to “avail themselves of their right to
challenge their removability through a habeas proceeding.”

, at *20. The court was flexible about the
details, “giv[ing] Defendants an opportunity to propose other
methods of coming into compliance,” which it would
“evaluate.” 

     The choice was up to defendants: They could voluntarily
provide a habeas process for plaintiffs to dispute and a court
determine whether they are in fact members of Tren de Aragua,
as defendants assert. Or defendants could leave that task for
another day and proceed to identify the people responsible for
the actions the court deemed potentially contemptuous. They
chose neither, instead appealing the Order and moving to stay
it pending resolution of the appeal or, in the alternative, for a
writ of mandamus to vacate the Order.

    We lack appellate jurisdiction, so we dismiss the appeal.
But the majority grants mandamus and vacates the probable-
cause Order.

     Again, defendants do not assert that the court lacks power
to order them to identify the potential contemnors. And they
explicitly disclaim “any power to defy judicial orders.” Reply
in Supp. of Stay 6. They instead argue that they complied with
the TRO.
                               5
     Judge Katsas apparently views defendants’ claim of
compliance as at least objectively plausible. He deems the
TRO unable to support a contempt prosecution because he
believes the TRO was so ambiguous that defendants could have
reasonably believed they obeyed it. As he sees it, the TRO
failed to make clear whether the court (a) was exercising the
full extent of its undisputed jurisdiction to enjoin defendants
from delivering the plaintiffs on board U.S.-controlled planes
into the hands of the Salvadoran government for indefinite
imprisonment or, alternatively, (b) opting to limit itself to
enjoining that conduct only insofar as the planes containing the
plaintiffs remained within U.S. airspace by the time the judge
imposed the TRO. But that theory fails to support mandamus
relief for at least two reasons.

     First, if such ambiguity were present, it could be fully
litigated as an ordinary defense to a contempt prosecution and
on appeal from conviction, which makes it ineligible for
mandamus. I am unaware of any case—and none is cited—
holding that ambiguity in the disobeyed court order is grounds
for a writ of mandamus to abort a contempt inquiry even before
any charging decision has been made. Judge Katsas views
mandamus as nonetheless necessary because the Order “gives
the Executive Branch an ultimatum” that is “constitutionally
fraught.” Katsas Op. 28. He worries that the order is
“problematic” because it “seeks to pressure” “the conduct of
foreign relations,” 

, or might require discovery that
could run afoul of state-secrets or presidential communications
privileges, 

. But any diplomatic efforts would be at the
option and under the command of the Executive, cf. Noem v.
Abrego Garcia, 

, 1018 (2025) (holding that the
district court properly required the Executive to “facilitate” a
U.S. resident’s “release from custody in El Salvador” and
questioning the court’s authority only insofar as it directed the
Executive to “effectuate” such release), and no informational
                               6
privilege was asserted in support of mandamus. Neither those
nor any of the other problems Judge Katsas anticipates, Katsas
Op. 30-33—including some defendants admittedly “did not
press . . . as a ground for mandamus,” 

 at 32—provides a
clear and indisputable entitlement that could support
mandamus.

     Second, there is no ambiguity in the TRO. “[A]n alleged
contemnor may not avoid” contempt proceedings “by ‘twisted
interpretations’ or ‘tortured constructions’ of the provisions of
the order.” In re Holloway, 

 (D.C. Cir.
1993) (quoting United States v. Greyhound Corp., 

 (7th Cir. 1974)). On the current record, it is not
plausible that defendants, aware of the TRO, might have
reasonably thought they were complying so long as their planes
had exited the territorial United States before the minute order
appeared on the docket. The putative ambiguity defendants
assert and Judge Katsas carefully elaborates depends on taking
the term “removing” out of the context of the words and events
in this case and substituting as “context” entirely different
circumstances, where statutory references or concepts of
“removal” have been used in ways that even defendants
themselves do not seriously contend apply here.

     Judge Rao takes a different tack. She sees the Order’s
“purpose and effect” as compelling the executive branch “to
assert custody of the removed gang members” or to take similar
action, which she concludes means the order improperly
“commingles civil and criminal contempt.” Rao Op. 4, 7. I see
at least three fatal defects in that position.

    First, defendants make no version of that argument, and
indeed expressly disclaim it. See Reply in Supp. of Stay 5 n.1
(arguing that it is “wrong” to “suggest that contempt
proceedings in this case [are] properly . . . characterized as
                               7
civil, not criminal”). Judge Rao’s departure from the party-
presentation principle alone should foreclose mandamus relief,
which depends on the petitioners, not the court, carrying the
burden to demonstrate a clear and indisputable right to such
relief. Cf. Cheney, 

.

     Second, even if such a departure were justifiable, I am
unaware of any authority, and Judge Rao cites none, providing
a clear entitlement to intrude on and limit a criminal contempt
inquiry because the court provides an option for the potential
contemnors to take voluntary, lawful action to avoid the
inquiry. If we accept that the district court has jurisdiction to
consider criminal contempt as a standalone matter, which
Judge Rao does not appear to question, the inclusion of a
“purge” option that defendants are entirely free to pretermit
makes the order, if anything, less onerous. Judge Rao sees no
such free choice, given what she says is the “coercive,”
“threatening,” “sword of Damocles”-like consequence to the
defendants should they decide against the purge option. But
the “threat” that would await them is none other than a
completely ordinary requirement to produce information of
central relevance to the pending criminal contempt inquiry.
That requirement is not rendered somehow impermissibly
coercive by the undoubted distastefulness of defendants’ duty
to respond in court to substantial claims of misconduct. That
is an onus our justice system regularly places even on persons
ultimately deemed to have committed no wrong.

    Third, if there were merit to the defect Judge Rao sees, it
would be fully and most narrowly remedied by eliminating the
“purge” option; her theory provides no support for her
preferred remedy of vacating the entire Order. But, again,
defendants have no clear and indisputable entitlement to
eliminate the “purge” option, nor have they sought that relief.
                               8
They have not shown a clear right to narrow the Order, let alone
vacate it.

     Because defendants can seek relief through the ordinary
appeals process and have no clear and indisputable right to
vacatur of the probable-cause Order—a point my colleagues’
differences highlight—I would deny the petition for the writ of
mandamus.

                               I.

                               A.

     The district court’s Memorandum Opinion describes the
facts supporting its April 16 probable-cause determination. See
J.G.G., 

, at *1-5. I recount the most salient
aspects here.

     In the early hours of Saturday, March 15, 2025, executive
branch officials reportedly “loaded scores of Venezuelans,”
including some of the five named plaintiffs in this case, “onto
buses, drove them to a nearby airport, and began putting them
onto . . . planes.” 

. The detainees were unaware that,
the day before, “the President had seemingly signed—but not
yet made public—a Proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies
Act” (AEA) of 1798 against members of Tren de Aragua
(TdA), a Venezuelan criminal gang, and prepared to summarily
deport them in reliance on the Proclamation. 

 The AEA
grants extraordinary authority to the President to restrain and
remove “natives, citizens, denizens, or subjects” of a hostile
nation or government that is in a “declared war” with the
“United States” or when “any invasion or predatory incursion
is perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of
the United States by [the] foreign nation or government.” 

.
                               9
     Plaintiffs’ attorneys caught wind of those developments.
At 1:12 a.m. that Saturday, they filed a class action complaint
and habeas petition in the District Court for the District of
Columbia and moved for a TRO to prevent their clients’
removal under the Proclamation. Plaintiffs, acting for
themselves and a class of similarly situated detainees, claimed
the AEA is inapplicable to TdA, which is not the Venezuelan
government, and challenged defendants’ reliance on the AEA
to sidestep protections of applicable statutes and the Due
Process Clause. See Compl. ¶¶ 1-4, 70-106, J.G.G. v. Trump,
No. 25-cv-766 (JEB), Dkt. No. 1 (D.D.C. Mar. 15, 2025). Each
plaintiff was already being held in immigration custody, and
each “adamantly denie[d] that he [was] . . . a member of Tren
de Aragua.” J.G.G., 

, at *2.

     Upon receiving no response from defendants, the district
court issued an ex parte TRO at 9:40 a.m. “to maintain the
status quo until a hearing can be set.” 9:40 a.m. Minute Order,
J.G.G. v. Trump, No. 25-cv-766 (JEB) (D.D.C. Mar. 15, 2025).
The five named plaintiffs and their counsel each attested that
plaintiffs were being held at the El Valle Detention Facility in
Raymondville, Texas, and were told they would be deported at
some point in the next two days. The TRO enjoined defendants
from “remov[ing] any of the individual Plaintiffs from the
United States.” 

 In response, defendants “abruptly
removed” several of the named plaintiffs from the planes. 

, at *2.

     But defendants appeared to be moving forward with
preparations to fly the hundreds of unnamed class members to
El Salvador, so plaintiffs’ counsel quickly moved for class
certification and a TRO to protect the class against removal
under the AEA before the court could consider its legality. See
Emergency Appl. for TRO at 1, J.G.G. v. Trump, No. 25-cv-
766 (JEB), Dkt. No. 3 (D.D.C. Mar. 15, 2025). At plaintiffs’
                              10
request, the district court set an emergency hearing for 5:00
p.m. the same day.

     An hour before the Saturday afternoon hearing was set to
begin, the White House made the Proclamation public by
posting it on its website. See Proclamation No. 10903, 

 (Mar. 20, 2025); J.G.G., 

, at *3.
Then, with the hearing before the district court already
underway, defendants rushed to dispatch two flights removing
Venezuelan detainees pursuant to the Proclamation. At the
hearing, the district court asked counsel for defendants whether
there were any “removals under this proclamation planned . . .
in the next 24 or 48 hours.” Hr’g Tr. 11:13-14, J.G.G. v.
Trump, No. 25-cv-766 (JEB), Dkt. No. 20 (D.D.C. Mar. 16,
2025) [hereinafter Hr’g Tr.]. Counsel that defendants had sent
to court to represent them on a challenge to the removals’
legality replied “I don’t know the answer to that question.”
Hr’g Tr. 11:15-16. When the court asked how soon he could
get that information, counsel responded “I can certainly talk to
them ASAP,” and undertook “as quickly as possible” to “find
out that information.” Hr’g Tr. 11:21-25. The court took a
brief recess to allow counsel to confer with his clients.

     We now know that one flight departed at 5:25 p.m. and the
other at 5:45 p.m. J.G.G., 

, at *3. When the
hearing reconvened at 6:00 p.m., defendants’ counsel reported
that he had “talked to the clients” who let him know
“operational details as to what is going on.” Hr’g Tr. 15:9-11.
When he referred to “potential national security issues” and
said “we may be able to provide Your Honor additional details
in an in camera hearing,” the court immediately responded
“Fine.” Hr’g Tr. 15:11-16. The courtroom deputy promptly
closed the public line to enable an in camera session. But, with
those arrangements in place, defendants’ counsel said he had
nothing he could report about removal flights—even though in
                                11
fact two flights with over two hundred people on board had by
then taken off. Plaintiffs’ counsel then stated his understanding
“that two flights went to El Salvador this afternoon; one very
recently,” and another (he thought but was not “entirely sure”)
was scheduled to depart for Honduras at 6:23 p.m., meaning
“only in a matter of minutes.” Hr’g Tr. 17:24-18:3.

     “With growing realization . . . that the Government might
be rapidly dispatching removal flights in an apparent effort to
evade judicial review,” the district court then moved swiftly to
provisionally certify a class of plaintiffs including all
noncitizens in U.S. custody subject to removal solely under the
Proclamation. J.G.G., 

, at *4. At around
6:45 p.m., with flights in the air, the court granted the TRO:

    So I find that a TRO is appropriate for the class members,
    and it would be to prevent the removal of the class for 14
    days or until further order of the Court. And the class will
    be all noncitizens in U.S. custody who are subject to the
    proclamation of March 15, 2025, and its implementation.

Hr’g Tr. 42:16-21. Spelling out how the TRO applied to the
facts if they were as the plaintiffs described, the court said that,
if class members were on a plane “that is going to take off or is
in the air,” then

    those people need to be returned to the United States.
    However that’s accomplished, whether turning around a
    plane or not embarking anyone on the plane . . . I leave to
    you. But this is something that you need to make sure is
    complied with immediately.

Hr’g Tr. 43:13-19. Several attorneys from the Department of
Justice listened on the public line to the district court delivering
that command. See Show Cause Hr’g Tr. 19:4-21, J.G.G. v.
Trump, No. 25-cv-766 (JEB), Dkt No. 76 (D.D.C. Apr. 4,
                                 12
2025).1 Former counsel for DOJ has since attested that he
communicated in a 6:44 p.m. email to client officials at DHS
Office of General Counsel, ICE Office of the Principal Legal
Advisor, and the DOS Office of Legal Advisor that the court
had issued a class-wide TRO, and in a 6:48 p.m. email that it
“specifically ordered us to not remove anyone in the class, and
to return anyone in the air.” Mot. to Supplement, Ex. A-4 at
17-19; ACLU Rule 28(j) Letter (June 25, 2025), Ex. 1 at 4, 11.

   The court entered a minute order on its docket at 7:25 p.m.
memorializing the TRO announced from the bench:

     As discussed in today’s hearing . . . [t]he Government is
     ENJOINED from removing [class members] pursuant to
     the Proclamation for 14 days.


1
  One of the lawyers listening to the hearing when the court ruled was
Erez Reuveni, who, at the time, was Acting Deputy Director for the
Office of Immigration Litigation. Mr. Reuveni has since disclosed
to Congress multiple emails he sent, beginning at 6:14 p.m. on March
15 and continuing until 8:07 a.m. the following morning, to senior
Homeland Security and State Department officials. He reported on
the entry of the TRO from the bench and the judge’s explanation that
it applied to plaintiff class members who might already be on planes
in the air. And he specifically confirmed at 10:13 p.m. that the TRO
prohibited removing detainees who had not yet been disembarked
from flights on the ground in El Salvador and restated DOJ’s
understanding that anyone in the air should be returned to the United
States. He further attests that lead counsel for defendants—Drew
Ensign—also sent an email at 7:31 p.m. (after the issuance of the
Minute Order) to those officials informing them of the injunction and
that it prohibited them from removing anyone within the class
definition. Mr. Ensign, like Mr. Reuveni, understood that the TRO
prohibited DHS from deplaning abroad any detainees on planes that
had departed U.S. airspace. See ACLU Rule 28(j) Letter (June 25,
2025), Ex. 1 at 4, 11-13; Mot. to Supplement, Ex. A-4 at 17-20.
                              13
7:25 p.m. Minute Order, J.G.G. v. Trump, No. 25-cv-766 (JEB)
(D.D.C. Mar. 15, 2025) [hereinafter 7:25 p.m. Minute Order].

     The two removal flights that had departed with hundreds
of plaintiff class members on board did not turn back. In the
face of the district court’s TRO barring plaintiffs’ removal,
defendants appear to have taken no steps to comply. Nor, to
the extent there was any confusion about the meaning of the
TRO, did defendants seek any clarification from the court. The
planes flew on to Honduras, one touching down at 7:37 p.m.
and the other at 8:10 p.m., and they remained there for several
hours. The planes did not then return from Honduras to the
United States. Instead, they continued to El Salvador, landing
in that country shortly after midnight on March 16.

     Because women and Central American nationals were not
accepted at the notorious Center for Terrorism Confinement
(CECOT), U.S. agents retained custody of the handful of
women and one Nicaraguan man aboard these planes and
returned them to the United States. See J.G.G., 

, at *4. They transferred the rest of the detainees into
Salvadoran custody for imprisonment in CECOT.

     Plaintiff class members remained imprisoned at CECOT
for four months, with no access to counsel or information
available about their circumstances. Just days ago, the United
States announced that 252 of those detainees have been
repatriated to Venezuela as part of a prisoner exchange. The
plaintiff class members, many of whom sought asylum in the
United States because of persecution they suffered at the hands
of the Venezuelan government and Tren de Aragua, still do not
appear to have been provided any opportunity to dispute the
executive branch’s allegations that they belong to TdA or the
legality of the Proclamation. See Manuel Rueda, 10 Americans
Are Freed by Venezuela in a Prisoner Swap for Migrants in El
                                14
Salvador, NPR (July 18, 2025), https://perma.cc/AE7U-SC3F.
Several of the class members who have been transferred to
Venezuela report that prison staff at CECOT subjected them to
abuse. See Sergio Martínez-Beltrán & Manuel Rueda, ‘Hell on
Earth’: Venezuelans Deported to El Salvador Mega-Prison
Tell of Brutal Abuse, NPR (July 27, 2025),
https://perma.cc/TP69-SMHJ.

                                B.

     Following the March 15 emergency hearing, the district
court denied defendants’ motion to vacate its TRO. The court
held that plaintiffs were likely to succeed on their claim that the
Due Process Clause guarantees individuals subject to removal
under the Proclamation an opportunity to challenge the
government’s assertion that they are enemy aliens before they
are removed on that basis. Defendants appealed, and we denied
a stay pending appeal. The two judges supporting that denial
doubted that the activities of a criminal gang satisfied the Alien
Enemies Act’s requirement that there be an “invasion or
predatory incursion . . . against the territory of the United States
by any foreign nation,” 

, and objected to the lack
of process afforded to the people subject to removal. See
J.G.G. v. Trump, No. 25-5067, 

, at *8-10
(D.C. Cir. Mar. 26, 2025) (Henderson, J., concurring); 

 (Millett, J., concurring).

    The Supreme Court summarily vacated the TROs on the
ground that habeas claims belong in the district of a detainee’s
confinement, not in the District of Columbia where defendants
are located. Trump, 145 S. Ct. at 1005-06. The Court
unanimously held, however, that detainees subject to removal
orders under the AEA are entitled to advance notice and an
opportunity to challenge their removal. Id. at 1006; id. at 1011-
12 (Sotomayor, J., dissenting). The Court has since enjoined
                              15
further removals to ensure detainees receive the process they
are due. See A.A.R.P. v. Trump, 

 (2025).

      Meanwhile, the district court began to consider whether
defendants had knowingly defied its TRO by transferring
detainees to Salvadoran custody after it enjoined them from
doing so. The court issued an Order to Show Cause eliciting
briefing on whether defendants had violated the court’s TRO
by failing to return class members they flew to El Salvador on
the evening of March 15 and turning them over for indefinite
imprisonment there. It then issued a Memorandum Opinion
and Order identifying probable cause to believe that they had.
J.G.G., 

, at *22.

     The court noted that, from the outset of the emergency
proceedings, defendants “refused to provide any relevant facts”
in hearings and filings and implausibly invoked the state-
secrets doctrine to avoid (or perhaps only to delay) providing—
even ex parte—publicly available flight details. 

. It
reasoned that the “numerous exchanges throughout the
hearing” demonstrated that its TRO was “clear and specific in
proscribing the handover of class members to Salvadoran
officials.” 

. And it explained why defendants’
assertion that the TRO might have been read to prevent only
the physical removal of class members from the territory of the
United States is unsupportable. 

. The wording
was clear, defendants acknowledged that the TRO must be
understood in the context in which it was issued, and “[a]nyone
paying attention to the hearing” would have known that the
TRO sought to prevent “not [plaintiffs’] mere transportation
across the U.S. border, but instead their discharge from U.S.
custody into a foreign country or into foreign hands.” 

.
                              16
     Accompanying its probable-cause Memorandum Opinion,
the court entered the Order from which my colleagues conclude
defendants have a clear and indisputable right to relief. The
Order says:

    Given the finding of probable cause for contempt set
    forth in the accompanying Memorandum Opinion, the
    Court ORDERS that:

    1. If Defendants opt to purge their contempt, they shall
    file by April 23, 2025, a declaration explaining the
    steps they have taken and will take to do so; and

    2. If Defendants opt not to purge their contempt, they
    shall instead file by April 23, 2025, declaration(s)
    identifying the individual(s) who, with knowledge of
    the Court’s classwide Temporary Restraining Order,
    made the decision not to halt the transfer of class
    members out of U.S. custody on March 15 and 16,
    2025.

April 16 Order. The district court thereby ordered the
production of information to enable it to assess a potential
referral for a contempt prosecution. And it offered defendants
an opportunity to avoid such a referral, whether by taking steps
to enable the individuals removed in apparent violation of the
Court’s classwide TRO to exercise their right to challenge their
removability, or by another “method[] of coming into
compliance” defendants themselves could propose. J.G.G.,

, at *20.

     Defendants moved the district court and this court to stay
that order pending appeal. The district court denied the motion
based, in part, on its view that defendants had not “made an
adequate showing [of likelihood of success] on the merits” nor
                               17
shown irreparable harm or any public interest in support of a
stay. J.G.G. v. Trump, No. 25-cv-766 (JEB), 

, at *1 (D.D.C. Apr. 18, 2025). As to the unlikelihood
that defendants would succeed in challenging the probable-
cause order, the court held that defendants “misconstru[ed] . . .
the Court’s directive” as having committed to a contempt
prosecution. 

 The court underscored that it “might
eventually refer this matter for prosecution,” but that “we are
not at that juncture,” making “separation-of-powers arguments
concerning any future prosecution(s) . . . premature and
misplaced.” 

 Defendants then filed in this court an
emergency motion for stay pending appeal or, in the
alternative, a writ of mandamus. Because the district court’s
order was not appealable, I noted my dissent from my
colleagues’ imposition of an administrative stay.

                               II.

     As in every case, we must first “assure ourselves of our
jurisdiction.” Perry Capital LLC v. Mnuchin, 

 (D.C. Cir. 2017). Defendants assert that there are two
grounds for us to exercise jurisdiction to stay or vacate the
district court’s Order. First, they contend we may enter a stay
pending appeal because the Order is effectively an injunction
or an appealable collateral order. Alternatively, they argue that
a writ of mandamus under the All Writs Act is appropriate to
halt the proceedings below. See 

.

     The panel is unanimous that no immediate appeal is
available. My colleagues instead grant a writ of mandamus.
They thus face the high burden to justify intervening in an
ongoing district court proceeding to overturn an unappealable
district court order. The extraordinary writ of mandamus is
available only when: (1) “the party seeking issuance of the writ
[has] no other adequate means to attain the relief he desires;”
                                 18
(2) “the petitioner [satisfies] the burden of showing that his
right to issuance of the writ is clear and indisputable;” and (3)
“the issuing court, in the exercise of its discretion, [is] satisfied
that the writ is appropriate under the circumstances.” Cheney,

 (citations, internal quotation marks, and
alterations omitted). Because it has not been shown to be
available here, I would also deny mandamus relief.

     I proceed by recounting how settled contempt doctrine
establishes the district court’s authority to proceed with its
criminal contempt inquiry despite the Supreme Court’s vacatur
of the underlying TRO. I then address, in turn, Judge Katsas
and Judge Rao’s separate analyses as to why mandamus relief
is warranted to halt those proceedings. I explain why each
theory is inconsistent with our precedent governing contempt
proceedings, the demanding standard for mandamus relief, and
the facts.

                                 A.

     It is fundamental to the “fair administration of justice” that
“no man can be judge in his own case” and “ignore all the
procedures of the law.” Walker v. City of Birmingham, 

 (1967). That rule applies no less to executive
branch officials than to anyone else who seeks protection or
vindication in the courts. A court has “inherent contempt
authority” to punish disobedience as a power “‘necessary to the
exercise of all others.’” Int’l Union, United Mine Workers of
Am. v. Bagwell, 

 (1994) (quoting United
States v. Hudson, 

 (1812)). “Criminal contempt
is a crime in the ordinary sense,” Bloom v. Illinois, 

 (1968), working mainly through deterrence but
ultimately dependent on recognized authority to punish
defiance when it occurs. Congress codified that authority in 

, which provides that any “court of the United
                                19
States shall have power to punish by fine or imprisonment, or
both, at its discretion, . . . [d]isobedience or resistance to its
lawful writ, process, order, rule, decree, or command.” 

(3).

    The district court’s authority to find probable cause that
criminal contempt occurred is well established, and it is
undiminished by the Supreme Court’s holding—after the
potentially contemptuous action—that venue of plaintiffs’
habeas claims lay in Texas, not here.

      Court orders routinely meet with strong opposition.
Ensuring that opposition seeks vindication by appeal within the
legal system, not in defiance of it, depends on contempt
authority. Whether valid or not, “an order issued by a court
. . . must be obeyed by the parties until it is reversed by orderly
and proper proceedings.” United States v. United Mine
Workers of Am., 

 (1947). Because criminal
contempt undergirds the obligation to obey even legally
defective court orders, a party “may be punished for criminal
contempt for disobedience of an order later set aside on
appeal,” even if it is set aside because the district court lacked
jurisdiction over the action. 

.

     The contempt power notably provides stronger protection
of judicial commands than the law affords to authoritative
statements of lawmakers or regulators: One who is prosecuted
for violating an invalid law or regulation may successfully
defend by challenging its legality, but the collateral bar rule
generally deprives a person of the same defense if he violates a
court order applying that same law. That is why civil rights
demonstrators who marched through Birmingham on Easter
Sunday 1963 in defiance of a court injunction enforcing
Birmingham’s unconstitutional parade ordinance had no First
Amendment defense to criminal contempt, whereas marchers
                                20
not subject to the injunction successfully challenged their
convictions based on the parade ordinance’s constitutional
flaw. Compare Walker, 

, with Shuttlesworth v.
City of Birmingham, 

 (1969).

     The district court’s authority to consider criminal
contempt is thus plainly unaffected by the Supreme Court’s
vacatur of the TRO for want of venue. Defendants argue only
that the district court lacked authority to pursue civil contempt
because the TRO had been vacated. See Reply in Supp. of Stay
5 n.1 (citing Willy v. Coastal Corp., 

 (1992)).
But the Supreme Court in Willy acknowledged that, even if the
order a putative contemnor defied is later held to have been
entered by a court lacking jurisdiction, it could nonetheless
support “a criminal contempt citation.” Willy, 

(citing Mine Workers, 

). To the extent that Judge
Katsas suggests otherwise, he claims only that the “impact of
jurisdictional defects in subsequent criminal-contempt
proceedings is unclear.” Katsas Op. 32. But the defect is not
“jurisdictional”; it has no impact on the criminal-contempt
proceedings, see Mine Workers, 

, as Judge Rao
appears to join me in recognizing, Rao Op. 8 n.2; and even if
its impact here were not clear, the “unclear” impact of a venue
defect on a court’s power to punish contempt of court is no
basis for mandamus.

     Because of the potency of the criminal contempt power,
parties facing a potential contempt charge have significant
procedural rights. See Bagwell, 

. An
accused contemnor may be entitled to “notice and a hearing,”
“the full protections of a criminal jury trial,” and the “right[] to
counsel.” 

. Further, criminal contempt must be
proved “beyond a reasonable doubt.” 

.
                              21
     And, although not required, courts sometimes opt to
provide additional protection to a potential criminal contemnor
by making a finding of probable cause before initiating
contempt proceedings. See J.G.G., 

, at *8
(noting examples). The district court in this case considered
“that practice to be a prudent way of affording alleged
contemnors the procedural protections associated with other
criminal proceedings,” and so followed it here. 

                              B.

     Judge Katsas votes to grant mandamus relief because, in
his view, the March 15 TRO’s prohibition against “removing”
the plaintiff class members was fatally ambiguous and
therefore unable to support a contempt determination.
Recognizing that “mandamus must not become a ‘substitute for
the regular appeal process,’” Katsas Op. 25 (quoting Cheney,
542 U.S. at 380–81), he identifies various anticipated
separation of powers concerns that he concludes tip the scale
in favor of mandamus. But no prosecution has been authorized,
no conduct of foreign relations ordered, and defendants have
adequate means to assert ambiguity or separation-of-powers
defenses in the ordinary course of any criminal contempt
prosecution that might ensue. Because defendants will have
ample, timely opportunity to assert their defenses, none of
them, whether singly or combined, is grounds for a writ of
mandamus.

     And in any case, defendants have no clear right to relief.
The TRO was not ambiguous. The district court could hardly
have been clearer. On the record in open court, with multiple
executive branch representatives listening, the court ordered
defendants for 14 days or until further notice not to remove the
class of noncitizens in its custody based on the Proclamation.
Hr’g Tr. 42:16-21 (“I find that a TRO is appropriate . . . to
                                22
prevent the removal of the class for 14 days or until further
order of the Court.”); see 7:25 p.m. Minute Order (“As
discussed in today’s hearing . . . [t]he Government is
ENJOINED from removing [noncitizens in U.S. custody]
pursuant to the Proclamation for 14 days.”).

     The only “ambiguity” was the factual opacity executive
branch officials created by refusing to provide the court with
any information whatsoever about what they were doing or had
done with the class members. During the TRO hearing, even
as defendants were secretly rushing to get the plaintiffs into the
Salvadoran prison, their counsel was filibustering the court’s
direct inquiries with assertions that he had no facts to share.
Once confronted with “plaintiffs’ information[,] unrebutted by
the government that flights are actively departing and plan to
depart,” Hr’g Tr. 43:6-10, the court quickly shifted from its
patient yet fruitless factual questioning of defendants’ counsel
to rule on the predicate questions and announce the TRO.

     Immediately after he announced the TRO barring the
plaintiffs’ “removal,” Judge Boasberg explained in concrete
and specific terms what the bar against “removing” the class
members meant on the opaque and shifting facts before him.
In open court, he told defendant’s counsel to “inform your
clients of this immediately” that “any plane containing these
folks that is going to take off or is in the air . . . those people
need to be returned to the United States. However that’s
accomplished, whether turning around a plane or not
embarking anyone on the plane, I leave to you. But this is
something that you need to make sure is complied with
immediately.” Hr’g Tr. 43:12-19. The clarity and force of
those statements was striking to anyone paying attention to the
proceedings.
                               23
                                1.
     As an initial matter, Judge Katsas’ analysis does not justify
mandamus because defendants have “other adequate means to
attain the relief [they] desire[].” Cheney, 

.
Defendants’ key argument—that the TRO is ambiguous—is a
quintessential merits defense to prosecution for criminal
contempt. But the court has not even announced it will make a
referral for such a prosecution. If defendants are prosecuted,
they will have the opportunity to raise any such defense during
those proceedings; if convicted, they will have the opportunity
to raise it again on appeal. That is how defendants have raised
similar arguments in every other case we have heard evaluating
the clarity of an injunction for contempt purposes. See, e.g.,
Holloway, 

; United States v. Young, 

 (D.C. Cir. 1997); In re Levine, 

 (D.C. Cir. 1994).

    Neither defendants nor Judge Katsas identify any case in
which putative ambiguity in the disobeyed court order
constituted grounds for a writ of mandamus to abort a contempt
inquiry even before any charging decision has been made.
Granting the writ here is especially inappropriate. As
explained in greater detail below, defendants have offered only
spurious, post hoc rationalizations to manufacture ambiguity
where there is none.

    To the extent defendants suggest such a departure from our
regular procedure is warranted in this case because of
separation-of-powers concerns, those arguments are premature
and, at least as vaguely sketched at this stage, meritless. “A
fundamental and longstanding principle of judicial restraint
requires that courts avoid reaching constitutional questions in
advance of the necessity of deciding them.” Lyng v. Nw. Indian
Cemetery Protective Ass’n, 

 (1988).
Defendants have not claimed any applicable constitutional
                               24
privilege shielding them from the obligation to comply with the
district court’s order to disclose the names of relevant
decisionmakers. Their separation-of-powers objections are
illusory and, at best, unripe. No appointment of an independent
prosecutor has been made, nor even any referral to the Justice
Department for prosecution. See J.G.G., 

,
at *21. If it comes to that, there will be a time—perhaps as
early as a charging decision—for defendants to raise their
separation-of-powers claims. Assessing defendants’ sweeping
constitutional assertions in their current contingent,
speculative, and nebulous form, without a concrete context
necessitating their resolution, is not a task we should embrace
in any context. And the demanding mandamus standard makes
our avoidance obligation dispositive: The availability of other
means to resolve defendants’ constitutional objections, if and
when they arise, should have caused us to deny mandamus.

     Judge Katsas also objects to the probable-cause Order’s
invitation to provide a process for plaintiffs to challenge their
membership in Tren de Aragua as a potential path out of the
contempt inquiry because he insists it interferes with the
Executive’s constitutional power to conduct foreign affairs.
But the Order does not require the executive branch to
“effectuat[e]” detainees’ return. Katsas Op. 29. It fully
respects the executive branch’s diplomatic prerogatives. The
Venezuelan government, which apparently now has custody of
the plaintiff class members, has announced that it will permit
them to leave Venezuela to travel to the United States if: (1)
they are called for in legal proceedings, such as a habeas
hearing, or otherwise required by court order; (2) the U.S.
government is willing to facilitate their travel; and (3) they are
willing to travel to the United States. See Harper Decl. ¶ 9,
J.G.G. v. Trump, 25-cv-766 (JEB), Dkt. No. 168-1 (D.D.C.
July 18, 2025).
                              25
     And, if the Executive elects to “assert custody,” Katsas
Op. 28, presumably with the cooperation of the Venezuelan
government, nothing in the Order suggests that successfully
doing so would require the U.S. to “release any of those
individuals” within the United States. J.G.G., 

, at *20. In that regard, the Order’s approach comports
with the Supreme Court’s recent decision upholding an order
insofar as it urges the executive branch to “facilitate” a
resident’s “release from custody in El Salvador.” Noem, 145
S. Ct. at 1018. That is especially true when the court has
invited defendants to propose their own, preferred approach as
the district court did here. None of that amounts to
commandeering the foreign policy of the United States. But
even if the “purge” option were somehow beyond the court’s
power to include, the correct course would be to grant
mandamus relief by striking that option for avoiding criminal
contempt proceedings, not the order in its entirety.

     The prematurity of defendants’ objections also
demonstrates why they fail the third requirement for mandamus
relief—that issuance of the writ be an appropriate exercise of
judicial discretion under the circumstances. Defendants could
take their pick of compliance alternatives. If they opted to
afford the plaintiff class members the process that habeas
requires, the district court’s invitation to propose other
acceptable “methods of coming into compliance” would
remain open to them. J.G.G., 

, at *20. None
of that would “interfere” with the executive branch’s ability to
discharge its constitutional responsibilities. Katsas Op. 26.
And the ball is still entirely in defendants’ court. Without
having made any decision as to what they will do, they cannot
show that the “writ is appropriate under the circumstances.”
Cheney, 

. That is yet another reason mandamus
is not warranted.
                               26
                                2.
    Defendants also have not carried their burden to
demonstrate a clear and indisputable right to relief. They claim
such a right based on their assertion that the TRO is ambiguous
and therefore cannot support a contempt conviction. But the
TRO unambiguously forbade the very actions defendants took.

     “In determining whether an order is sufficiently clear and
specific to justify a contempt conviction, we apply an objective
standard that takes into account both the language of the order
and the objective circumstances surrounding the issuance of the
order.” United States v. Young, 

 (D.C. Cir.
1997).

     The court’s language was plain. It restrained defendants
from “removing” the class of plaintiffs in their custody.
Defendants had no basis to wonder whether that applied to
plaintiff class members on planes that had already left the
United States en route to El Salvador; the court told them point-
blank that they must bring back anyone on the planes, even if
the planes were in flight.

     The context in which the court announced the TRO
confirms that it unambiguously barred defendants from
removing plaintiffs from U.S. custody even if they were no
longer in the United States. The relevant context includes “[1]
the relief sought by the moving party, [2] the evidence
produced at the hearing on the injunction, and [3] the mischief
that the injunction seeks to prevent.” Common Cause v.
Nuclear Regul. Comm’n, 

, 927 (D.C. Cir. 1982).

    Begin with the relief plaintiffs sought. Their counsel
rushed to the court for a TRO to prevent plaintiffs’ removal
under the AEA without any prior opportunity to dispute their
membership in Tren de Aragua or the validity of the
                               27
Executive’s reliance on the AEA. They sought to prevent
removal because “if Plaintiffs are removed to the custody of
another country, this Court will lose jurisdiction.” Emergency
Appl. for TRO 1, J.G.G. v. Trump, No. 25-cv-766 (JEB), Dkt.
No. 3 (D.D.C. Mar. 15, 2025) (emphasis added in part, and in
original in part).

     And consider the evidence produced at the emergency
hearing later the same day, which fueled the concerns voiced
in plaintiffs’ TRO application about the potential evasion of
judicial authority. At the hearing, plaintiffs’ counsel reported
new information from “people on the ground . . . that planes
are going right now taking Venezuelans to El Salvador,” that
the plaintiffs “may be ending up in a Salvadoran prison,” Hr’g
Tr. 12:17-20, and that “two flights . . . may have already taken
off,” Hr’g Tr. 12:23-25.

     The proceedings highlighted the third contextual
element—“the mischief that the injunction seeks to prevent”—
in unmistakable terms. Counsel for plaintiffs drove home that
the TRO must prevent class members’ transfer to Salvadoran
custody both because people “ending up in a Salvadoran
prison” are “in real trouble” and because such a transfer would
“divest this Court of jurisdiction,” Hr’g Tr. 12:19-21, making
it unable “to offer a remedy,” Hr’g Tr. 36:17-19. The court
echoed the plaintiffs’ concern that it could lose “jurisdiction to
require [the class members’] return” if “planes have already
landed and discharged their occupants.” Hr’g Tr. 44:6-9.
Defendants think it fatal that the court said, a few minutes
earlier, “once [detainees] are out of the country, I’m not sure
what I can do there.” Mot. for Stay 15 (quoting Hr’g Tr. 36:20-
21). But the entire discussion, before and after that statement,
centered on the potential loss of the court’s jurisdiction if
defendants ceded custody over the plaintiff class members to a
foreign sovereign. That is why the court expressed concerns
                               28
about what would happen if the planes that landed abroad
discharged their occupants. See Hr’g Tr. 44:6-9.

     Within a minute of announcing its TRO to “prevent the
removal” of “all noncitizens in U.S. custody who are subject to
the proclamation of March 15, 2025,” Hr’g Tr. 42:16-21, the
court spelled out the compliance it expected: “[A]ny plane
containing these folks that is going to take off or is in the air
needs to be returned to the United States.” Hr’g Tr. 43:12-18.
The court’s meaning was manifest when it announced the TRO,
which it duly memorialized in unchanged form on its docket
thirty minutes later.

                                3.
     Faced with the unambiguous command, overwhelmingly
confirmed by context—to prevent plaintiffs from being
transferred out of U.S. custody and bring them back to the
United States—defendants attempt post hoc to manufacture
ambiguity in the TRO. They assert that “the most appropriate
contextual reading of ‘removal’ is the physical, territorial one,”
limited to removing plaintiffs from “the territory of the United
States,” and that it had “not anything to do with ‘custody.’”
Mot. for Stay 15. They claim it would have been reasonable
for defendants to think the court’s prohibition meant only that
defendants must not convey plaintiffs across the U.S. border,
and that it had no effect if plaintiffs had already been spirited
out of the country when the court announced the TRO. Judge
Katsas sees that alternative reading as sufficient to support
mandamus. Starting from the premise that ambiguity in an
order must be resolved in favor of the party alleged to have
defied it, he concludes that these defendants have “a clear and
indisputable right to relief because the TRO was insufficiently
clear to support criminal contempt.” Katsas Op. 11.
                              29
    For potential contemnors “[t]o provide a defense to
criminal contempt, [their] mistaken construction of an order
must be one which . . . was adopted in good faith and which,
given the background and purpose of the order, is plausible.”
Holloway, 

 (quoting Greyhound Corp., 

 (alterations removed)). Defendants’ mistaken
construction is entirely implausible. Their argument asks us to:

    1. Separate the TRO from its context by treating the 7:25
       p.m. Minute Order in isolation as the entirety of the
       TRO. Mot. for Stay 16-17; see Katsas Op. 11-12.

    2. Scrutinize the Minute Order’s text to ascribe various
       meanings to the word “removing,” including some
       from inapposite contexts in which “removing” has
       what the parties term a “territorial” meaning limited to
       physical expulsion from the territory of the United
       States. Mot. for Stay 14-15; see Katsas Op. 13-16.

    3. Conclude that the district court used the term
       “removing” in a “territorial” way in the 7:25 Minute
       Order, in conflict with the “custodial” way in which it
       used the same term in the TRO as announced from the
       bench and reiterated in the probable-cause Order. Mot.
       for Stay 17; see Katsas Op. 20-22.

    4. Conclude that, despite the consistent prohibition in the
       TRO as announced orally and as memorialized in the
       7:25 Minute Order against “removing” members of the
       plaintiff class, a reasonable observer might have
       thought that, in the thirty-minute interval between the
       TRO hearing and the Minute Order, the district court
       changed its mind and entered a Minute Order adopting
       a distinct, arbitrarily limited, “territorial” view of its
       own power that directly conflicted with what it said
                               30
        during the hearing. And we would have to find
        plausible that the court, in doing so, saw no need to
        alert defendants of a substantial shift from its clear and
        vehement contrary position, and that defendants saw
        no need to confirm what they now claim was an about-
        face of determinative benefit to them. Mot for Stay 17-
        18; see Katsas Op. 21-23.

None of those propositions is plausible. Failure on any one is
sufficient to foreclose mandamus relief. Because each building
block of the defendants’ position crumbles under scrutiny, we
should deny the writ.

                               i.

     Defendants begin by attempting to cleave the TRO from
its context by treating the 7:25 p.m. Minute Order as the only
operative order. See Mot. for Stay 16-17. They imply no TRO
was entered until the 7:25 p.m. Minute Order appeared on the
court’s docket. See id. at 13-14. But the court’s oral command
to halt the removal of plaintiff class members in U.S. custody
already bound the defendants. See, e.g., In re LeFande, 

 (D.C. Cir. 2019) (holding that “the judge’s
in-person order sufficed to compel LeFande to give testimony”
and supported his criminal contempt citation); In re Bradley,

 (5th Cir. 2009) (holding that district
court’s oral injunction, which was not reduced to writing for
almost a month, supported contempt citation for actions taken
in violation of the oral injunction). “Oral orders are just as
binding on litigants as written orders; the consequences for
violating an oral order are the same as those for violating a
written order.” Malautea v. Suzuki Motor Co., 

,
1542 n.7 (11th Cir. 1993). And there is no question that the
“explanation” for an injunction—especially one orally
                              31
announced—“can be oral rather than written.” EEOC v. Severn
Trent Svcs., 

 (7th Cir. 2004) (Posner, J.).

    The court spelled out from the bench how its just-
announced TRO restrained removal of plaintiff class members,
even if they were already in the air or had landed abroad. See
Hr’g Tr. 43:13-19. That is the TRO the Minute Order
memorialized when it recorded on its docket that, “[a]s
discussed in today’s hearing,” “[t]he Government is
ENJOINED from removing [noncitizens in U.S. custody]
pursuant to the Proclamation for 14 days.” 7:25 p.m. Minute
Order.

     In the cases defendants cite from the Seventh Circuit, the
ordering courts either refused to explain the scope of an
injunction when requested to do so by the parties—either orally
or in writing—or failed to clarify whether the court’s statement
was an injunction at all. See Mot. for Stay 16-17; Katsas Op.
21. Those cases also “discussed the inadequacy of oral decrees
in determining whether there was a valid, appealable order, not
in the context of contempt proceedings.” Bradley, 

. Their reasoning is self-evidently inapplicable (and
nonbinding) here. The 7:25 Minute Order both tracked the
ordering language the court used from the bench and explicitly
referenced the TRO hearing minutes before, during which the
court had spelled out how the TRO against “removing” the
plaintiffs applied to the unfolding events. Defendants suggest
the Minute Order’s failure to reiterate those explanations made
it reasonable to think the court intended it as a new and
different order disavowing the TRO announced and explained
at the just-concluded hearing. See Mot. for Stay 17-18.

     There was only one TRO. The ordering language
memorialized on the docket was the same as the wording the
court used in the TRO as announced from the bench. Nothing
                               32
suggests that the TRO’s meaning somehow changed when it
was written in the docket. It still meant, as the district court
had just explained from the bench, that defendants must not
remove the plaintiffs to the custody of another country and
must return them to the United States. The Minute Order made
that continuity explicit when it incorporated what was
“discussed in today’s hearing.” 7:25 p.m. Minute Order.
Because there was only one TRO, and it unambiguously
prohibited defendants from removing the plaintiff class
members from U.S. custody, no matter where they were
located, there is no conflict that requires us to “elevate[]” the
Minute Order above the court’s oral statements. Mot. for Stay
17.

                               ii.

     The second essential premise of defendants’ position is
also unsound. They insist that the Minute Order’s reference to
“removing” class members could be understood as barring only
their removal from the territory of the United States, thereby
lacking any prohibitive force against defendants’ transferring
custody of any class members to the Salvadoran government if,
by the time of the TRO, defendants had already taken them
outside the United States. Under the rule of lenity, they argue,
that putative ambiguity suffices to foreclose further criminal
proceedings. See Mot. for Stay 14-15; Katsas Op. 12-13.
Lenity applies when, “after seizing everything from which aid
can be derived,” the statement is “still grievously ambiguous.”
Wooden v. United States, 

 (2022) (Gorsuch,
J., concurring) (internal quotation marks omitted). It “does not
apply” when a statement “merely contains some ambiguity or
is difficult to decipher.” 

 Nothing was ambiguous, let alone
“grievously” so, in the TRO the court held defendants probably
defied.
                               33
     The variety of ways the word “removing” may be used in
the law and in general parlance did not somehow render
ambiguous the district court’s TRO restraining these
defendants from removing these plaintiff class members under
the circumstances before the court on the evening of March 15.
Defendants argue it is fatal to contempt proceedings that “the
district court itself acknowledged that both definitions are
possible.” Mot. for Stay 14. But the court was only
summarizing defendants’ argument to emphasize that the
existence of possible meanings of the word “removal,” taken
out of context, does not mean there are multiple plausible
constructions of this TRO. See J.G.G., 

, at
*11. For example, dictionary definitions of the word “remove”
may “connote physical displacement from one location to
another,” Katsas Op. 13 (emphasis in original), but that says
nothing about the scope of a court’s intention or authority to
restrain physically sending persons to a foreign sovereign’s
prison.

     Reference to “removal” in the Alien Enemies Act is
unhelpful to defendants. The importance under the AEA of
repelling and excluding nationals of an invading enemy from
U.S. territory imposes no logical or legal constraint on a court’s
jurisdiction over U.S. officials transporting detainees abroad.
As the district court put it, “just because an ‘invasion’ or
‘predatory incursion’ must be ‘against the territory of the
United States’ to trigger the Act’s authorities does not resolve
whether the process of removal comprises a physical departure
or a transfer of custody.” J.G.G., 

, at *11
(quoting 

). If we assume that U.S. power to
“remove” citizens of an enemy country under the AEA is
unconstrained by the enemy country’s agreement to take them
back, see Katsas Op. 14-15, that proposition carries no
implication that “removing” in the March 15 TRO—or even
under the AEA itself—is limited to ejecting them from U.S.
                                34
territory. The AEA’s attention to removals from the territorial
homeland provides no reason to think the district court’s ability
to enjoin removal of the plaintiff class members terminated at
the U.S. border.

     Various definitions of removal in the Immigration and
Nationality Act (INA) similarly do not bear on its meaning in
the TRO. The notion that a removal may suffice to support a
prosecution under 

(a)(1) for illegal entry after
having been “removed” from the United States “regardless of
any admission or detention decision by the country on the
receiving end,” for example, Katsas Op. 15, does not imply a
limit on a court’s authority to halt the removal of aliens still in
U.S. custody during the removal process—whether the United
States holds those aliens on a plane, a boat, see 

 (citing
United States v. Sanchez, 

 (7th Cir. 2010)),
or in some other manner.

     Judge Katsas asks where else defendants should have
looked but to the AEA and INA to understand what Chief
Judge Boasberg meant in his TRO barring defendants from
“removing” the members of the plaintiff class. Katsas Op. 24.
The Minute Order itself says where: Look to “today’s
hearing,” 7:25 p.m. Minute Order, at which the district court
had just spelled out that its TRO not to “remove” the members
of the plaintiff class required “those people need to be returned
to the United States . . . [h]owever that’s accomplished.” Hr’g
Tr. 43:15-16. Defendants’ “territorial” interpretation is
orthogonal to the question that was before the district court—
how it could maintain its authority to provide plaintiffs a
remedy—and is entirely implausible as a reading of the district
court’s TRO.
                              35
                              iii.

     Defendants’ third essential step is to distance themselves
from the TRO’s unmistakably clear bar against removing the
plaintiffs from U.S. custody. They do not dispute that the
district court’s order from the bench—to prevent the removal
of all noncitizens in U.S. custody who are subject to the
Proclamation by returning any planes containing them to the
United States—used the term “removal” in a custodial sense.
See Hr’g Tr. 42:16 – 43:18. Rather, they argue that the 7:25
Minute Order reflected a “territorial” interpretation of
“removing” that conflicts with the TRO as orally announced in
open court, such that ambiguity arising from that conflict
entitles them to mandamus relief.

     The clarity of the TRO as announced, and the irrelevance
of the material defendants muster in support of a territorially
limited interpretation, fatally undermine the existence of the
conflict they assert. The Minute Order cannot permissibly be
read in isolation from the oral TRO it explicitly memorialized
and the context the hearing provides. The “conflict” is entirely
manufactured by defendants post hoc. And the abstract
“context” in which defendants and Judge Katsas seek to situate
the Minute Order cannot supersede the actual context of the
TRO.

                              iv.

     Finally, to credit defendants’ contention that the court’s
oral statements and the Minute Order “conflict,” we would
have to accept a fourth essential premise that they have failed
to establish. Defendants cannot explain how any reasonable
person in defendants’ position might have concluded on the
evening of March 15 that the district court in fact changed its
mind as to the scope of the TRO it announced from the bench,
and so entered a Minute Order that it intended as a new and
                                36
different TRO. To establish as much requires more than a
theory of how the Minute Order might be read to conflict with
the TRO as announced. It demands that we find it plausible
that defendants could have thought the district court actually
did change its mind in the thirty-minute interval between the
hearing and issuing the Minute Order but said nothing to alert
defendants of that change. Defendants’ account is at war with
the record, common sense, and their own counsels’ emails,
which show that they had a custodial understanding of the
TRO—which they promptly and consistently communicated to
their clients.2 See ACLU Rule 28(j) Letter (June 25, 2025),
Ex. 1 at 4, 11-13; Mot. to Supplement, Ex. A-4 at 17-19.

                                a.

     Defendants observe that the ex parte TRO issued on the
morning of March 15 enjoined removal of the named plaintiffs
“from the United States,” whereas the 7:25 p.m. Minute Order
made no geographic specification. See Mot. for Stay 13-15;
Katsas Op. 17. But if anything, that distinction cuts against
reading the evening TRO as territorially limited. The
difference accounts for the practical reality that the
circumstances had changed during the day. In declarations
attached to the morning TRO application, each named plaintiff
attested to being held in the El Valle Detention Facility in
Texas. By the evening, however, unrebutted, credible evidence
suggested that flights carrying detainees had already departed
or imminently would leave Texas for El Salvador, so a TRO
framed in terms of removal “from the United States” might be

2
  Defendants “forcefully den[y]” the whistleblower report. Gov’t
Rule 28(j) Letter at 2 (June 26, 2025). But the report’s unrebutted
allegations and attached emails further underscore why mandamus
relief is inappropriate here: Defendants cannot show a clear and
indisputable right to relief when there is, at minimum, a material
dispute over how they themselves understood the TRO.
                                37
ineffective to ensure the plaintiffs remained in U.S. custody
and returned to the United States. See supra Section II.B.2. It
is clear under the circumstances that both TROs required
defendants to maintain custody of the plaintiffs and keep them
in the United States so the district court would have jurisdiction
to order a remedy. There is certainly no anomaly of the evening
TRO “exceed[ing] the protection afforded . . . under the first
[TRO].” Katsas Op. 17.

     The record also does not support the notion that the district
court “changed its mind” about requiring defendants to bring
back to the United States any alleged Tren de Aragua members
the Executive had flown abroad, nor does it show the court
having “strongly disclaimed” its order to turn planes around
mid-flight. Katsas Op. 22; see also Mot. for Stay 17-18. To
the contrary, it consistently maintained in the hearing at which
it announced the TRO and ever since that the TRO was an
“order . . . to turn the planes around, or . . . in whatever fashion
[defendants] could, to bring people to the United States.” Mot.
Hr’g Tr. 5:12-15, J.G.G. v. Trump, No. 25-cv-766 (JEB), Dkt
No. 51 (D.D.C. Mar. 21, 2025). And defendants’ counsel has
confirmed that he “understood [that was the court’s] intent.”
Mot. Hr’g Tr. 6:1-2.

     The putative disavowal was nothing of the sort. What
defendants cite is just the court’s refutation of their own
accusation that the court “mandat[ed] that they turn[] planes
around in mid-air without regard to important logistical
constraints such as fuel availability or foreign airspace
restrictions,” 

, at *17 (internal quotation
marks omitted), by recalling that it had said “[h]owever that’s
accomplished . . . I leave it to you.” Hr’g Tr. 43:16-19. The
court took care at the time to make clear it was not dictating
aviation maneuvers when it ordered that “those people need to
be returned to the United States.” Hr’g Tr. 43:15.
                                38
      Judge Katsas reads one observation by the district court—
that, as to the nine detainees whom defendants brought back to
the United States, “the choice to hold them in the United States
. . . was the Government’s, not this Court’s,” J.G.G., 

, at *17—to disavow having imposed “any
overarching requirement to return suspected TdA members to
the United States.” Katsas Op. 20. But he reads too much into
that descriptive phrase. The return of those individuals was
undisputedly due to the Salvadoran government’s refusal to
accept them, not in response to—or suggesting anything about
the scope of—the district court’s TRO. Indeed, the ease with
which defendants brought those nine detainees back only
underscores the absurdity of their claim that it was somehow
dangerous or logistically impossible to bring back all class
members, even after the planes had landed.

     The court repeatedly emphasized its unambiguous
objective not to lose jurisdiction even as it offered flexibility as
to the means available to defendants to comply. And it did so
in the face of defendants’ effort to keep the court in the dark
about what they were doing. To the extent defendants had
unvoiced operational concerns about turning planes around or
bringing the class members back to the United States, the court
explained that they could take any steps necessary to address
those concerns, so long as they maintained custody of the
plaintiffs in the interim and returned them to the United States
when it was feasible to do so. The court’s focus throughout
was that defendants keep the detainees in U.S. custody, return
them to the United States, and not act to defeat the court’s
jurisdiction while the case was being adjudicated.

                                b.

   Defendants also cannot explain why the district court
would have thought its authority to halt the removals
                               39
terminated when the planes left U.S. airspace. It is telling that
they never argue the court’s authority was so limited. Nor
could they. The federal courts’ jurisdiction over executive
branch activities abroad is well settled. See Munaf v. Geren,

 (2008); Doe v. Mattis, 

(D.C. Cir. 2019); see also Fuld v. Pal. Liberation Org., 

 (2025) (Thomas, J., concurring) (“[C]oncerns
over foreign affairs are no reason to impose constitutional
limits on federal courts’ extraterritorial jurisdiction.”). When
the court entered its TRO, the plaintiff class members remained
squarely in U.S. custody. They were aboard planes chartered
by the U.S. government, directed and staffed by U.S.
government personnel or agents, who reported to a chain of
command consisting of senior executive branch officials
located in Washington, D.C.

     Judge Katsas gestures towards three legal concerns he
believes could reasonably have been thought to have
influenced the district court’s thinking but none of them is
applicable and none of them delimits the district court’s
authority to U.S. territory. See Katsas Op. 19-20.

     First, he suggests that Munaf v. Geren stands for the
proposition that the court could not enjoin defendants from
transferring detainees into Salvadoran custody once the planes
arrived there. See id. at 20. But petitioners in Munaf had
voluntarily traveled from the United States to Iraq for the
purpose of committing serious crimes in that country and were
detained there for ongoing Iraqi criminal proceedings when
they sought habeas. See 553 U.S. at 694. The plaintiffs here
committed no crimes in El Salvador giving rise to any
Salvadoran interest in asserting custody to prosecute them there
and they were not yet in Salvadoran territory. Nothing about
the district court’s decision to enjoin their removal from U.S.
custody could have reasonably been thought to infringe El
                               40
Salvador’s “exclusive jurisdiction to punish offenses against its
laws committed within its borders.” Id. at 694-95 (quoting
Wilson v. Girard, 

 (1957)). And even if
Munaf did prevent a U.S. court from halting any transfer of
detainees on foreign soil, by its terms that prohibition would
only become applicable after they entered El Salvador, not—
as defendants contend—as soon as the planes left the territorial
United States.

     Second, Judge Katsas reasons that the district court could
not order members of Tren de Aragua back to the United States
because the INA prohibits the admission of members of foreign
terrorist organizations into the United States. 

 at 19 (citing

(a)(3)(B)(i)(V)).                 That argument
inappropriately assumes that detainees are all members of TdA,
which the detainees have a right to contest and the Executive
has yet to prove. See J.G.G., 145 S. Ct. at 1006. And, even if
we assume that prohibition applies to detainees in continuous
U.S. custody who are brought back into the U.S. in response to
a court order to temporarily restore the status quo, defendants
had other options to retain the plaintiffs in their custody. They
could presumably bring them in as parolees, i.e., entrants
without legal admission, see 

(a)(13)(B); 

§ 1182(d)(5). Defendants’ failure to raise any such concern at
the TRO hearing, where the district court equated defendants’
retaining custody over the class members with bringing them
back to the United States, further undercuts their effort to
ascribe to the court a sudden about-face on that basis.

     Finally, Judge Katsas likens a TRO requiring defendants
to maintain custody of the detainees to Justice Douglas’s order
halting the bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War.
Katsas Op. 20. But to suggest on that ground that the district
court might reasonably have suddenly changed its mind and
narrowed its TRO to avoid judicial overreach only makes the
                                41
opposite point. Whatever one might think about a Supreme
Court Justice’s emergency order superintending an ongoing
military operation,3 the authority of a federal district court to
temporarily restrain government officials from transferring
presumptively noncriminal detainees to a foreign prison
without any pre-removal process is well recognized. See, e.g.,
Doe, 

.

                              ***

     It is entirely inappropriate to issue a writ of mandamus
under these circumstances. Defendants cannot show they lack
alternative means of getting relief when their main argument—
that the TRO is ambiguous—is an ordinary merits defense.
That is an issue for any future trial, if one takes place, and on
appeal from any conviction. And Defendants’ diffuse and
premature constitutional objections to the April 16 Order’s
contingent and unexercised options do not ripen their argument
that the TRO was ambiguous. The consistency of the TRO as
orally announced and memorialized in the Minute Order, the
context of the proceedings, the vague constitutional concerns,
and the striking absence of any underlying legal theory
supporting a territorially limited interpretation all belie
defendants’ strenuous efforts to explain away the district
court’s clear command. Post hoc analysis of the word
“removal,” taken out of the context of the TRO, surely can
tease out varieties of other uses with distinct meanings. But
that falls short of establishing that any reasonable person in

3
   Throughout the litigation that culminated in Holtzman v.
Schlesinger, 

 (1973), the Executive never asserted it
was exempt from compliance with court orders defining the
parameters of lawful overseas military activity. See Burt Neuborne,
No, the Defense Department Did Not “Ignore” a Judicial Order in
1973 Cambodia Bombing Case, JUST SEC. (Feb. 27, 2025),
https://perma.cc/YE2U-4ZEW.
                               42
defendants’ position could have misunderstood it—let alone
that defendants actually did. I would therefore deny mandamus
relief.
                               C.
     Judge Rao votes to grant mandamus relief based on a novel
theory that defendants never raised and neither party briefed.
She casts the district court’s Order as an impermissible
commingling of civil and criminal contempt and concludes
that, since the underlying TRO is vacated, the district court
lacks jurisdiction to pursue the part that looks to her like civil
contempt. Cf. United Mine Workers, 

. But
courts must remain “neutral arbiters” by “adopt[ing] the
framing of the dispute that is advanced by the parties,” Nat’l
Ass’n of Realtors v. United States, 

 (D.C. Cir.
2024) (internal quotation marks and citations omitted), and
defendants themselves recognize that the potential contempt
the Order describes is criminal. See, e.g., Mot. for Stay 11 &
n.1, 20; Reply in Supp. of Stay 3, 5 n.1, 6, 10, 11. Defendants
nowhere object, as Judge Rao does, to the “purge” option as
impermissibly injecting a civil element into the contempt
proceeding. That alone forecloses mandamus relief. It is “the
petitioner,” not the court, that “must satisfy the burden of
showing that his right to issuance of the writ is clear and
indisputable.” Cheney, 

 (internal quotation
marks and alterations omitted). Defendants surely cannot
satisfy that demanding burden when they expressly disclaim
the very argument that Judge Rao believes meets it.

     Even if defendants had advanced it, Judge Rao’s theory
fails. The common thread that defines a contempt proceeding
as civil is that it seeks to prod the recalcitrant contemnor to
come into compliance with the court’s order in an ongoing
proceeding. To that end, a civil contempt order imposes
punishment from which it offers relief when the contemnor
                                43
complies. Criminal contempt, in contrast, imposes a definite
sanction on a completed contempt, and is the only option when
compliance with a resisted order is no longer possible. When
courts sentence a contemnor to confinement, the contempt is
criminal if “the contemnor cannot avoid or abbreviate the
confinement through later compliance.” Bagwell, 

. If the contemnor can secure earlier release by
complying with a court order, the contempt is civil. See 

. So, too, when a court imposes a fine, contempt is criminal
if the “contemnor has no subsequent opportunity to reduce or
avoid the fine through compliance,” and it is civil if it can halt
an accumulating fine by complying. 

.

     The district court’s Order does not seek to “coerce the
government” to comply with the TRO. Rao Op. 6. If it did,
Judge Rao’s theory would fail the first requirement for
mandamus relief, that there be no “other adequate means to
attain the relief [they] desire[].” Cheney, 

. A
coercive order that granted plaintiffs some of the relief they
seek would be immediately appealable as “an order that had the
practical effect of an injunction.” I.A.M. Nat’l Pension Fund
Benefit Plan A v. Cooper Indus., Inc., 

 (D.C.
Cir. 1986) (defining appealable injunctive orders as “any order
directed to a party, enforceable by contempt, and designed to
accord or protect[] some or all of the substantive relief sought
by a complaint in more than preliminary fashion” (internal
quotation marks omitted)). Judge Rao insists that the “purpose
and effect of [the probable-cause Order] is to compel the
government to exercise its foreign affairs powers to assert
custody” of the class members. Rao Op. 4. She forswears a
stay pending a merits panel’s adjudication of defendants’
appeal in favor of the stronger medicine of mandamus, see Rao
Op. 13, but the availability of that other relief on the theory she
advances renders mandamus inappropriate.
                               44
     In any event, the Order is not a civil contempt order
seeking to coerce compliance, and it entirely lacks the practical
effect of an injunction. The timing of defendants’ potentially
contumacious conduct prevented the probable-cause Order
from “coercing” the executive branch the way a civil contempt
order could—by presenting the contemnor with the choice to
comply or face immediate and continuing punishment. There
was no chance to coerce defendants’ compliance as the planes
flew toward El Salvador in the face of the TRO; the stealth and
speed of defendants’ action left no opening for a civil contempt
order pressuring them to turn the planes back. By the time the
potential contempt was apparent, it was fait accompli, with
criminal contempt the sole remaining choice. The district court
thus proceeded to spell out the facts raising probable cause of
criminal contempt. Neither of the options it provides coerces
the government.

     There is no “coercion” in the district court requiring
defendants to provide the names of potential contemnors. That
is not a threat but a standard request for information that may
inform a prosecution for criminal contempt. Unlike other cases
in which we blocked inquiries into government officials’ role
in challenged conduct, see Rao Op. 17, defendants here have
not denied the relevance of these materials to any future
proceedings; they have not asserted any applicable immunity
or privilege shielding them from responding; and they have not
claimed that any high-ranking official gratuitously faces
burdensome inquiries that other witnesses are better suited to
answer. Accordingly, there is no encroachment on executive
power in that request that could amount to coercion.

     There are, to be sure, overtones of civil contempt in the
district court’s “purge” option—and, indeed, the concept of
purging contempt is drawn from the civil version, but it is
simply not the case that the presence of that option means the
                               45
probable-cause Order imposes civil contempt. A court’s offer
of lenient treatment to a potential criminal defendant in
exchange for a commitment to engage in mitigating conduct
does not render the invitation to mitigate impermissibly
coercive. A court may, for example, afford lenience to a person
facing criminal charges if the defendant agrees to act as an
informant or provide inculpating testimony, even though the
court plainly lacks power to order those actions. Even “[w]here
a judgment of contempt is embodied in a single order which
contains an admixture of criminal and civil elements, the
criminal aspect of the order fixes its character for purposes of
procedure on review.” Penfield Co. of Cal. v. SEC, 

 (1947) (emphasis added). And there is no “substantial
prejudice” to defendants in the district court’s decision to
proceed in criminal contempt so long as their “rights in the
criminal trial are not diluted.” Mine Workers, 

.
No prosecution has been initiated, let alone a trial conducted to
determine whether there has been any such dilution.

    The Supreme Court has repeatedly confirmed as much. In
Yates v. United States, it held that a contempt sentence imposed
on a witness who refused to testify before a district court was
criminal even though the sentencing judge “express[ed] . . .
hope that [the] petitioner would still ‘purge herself’” by
answering questions at the time of her sentencing or in the 60-
day period thereafter and suggested he would reduce her
sentence if she did so. 

 (1957). And in
Bagwell, the Court squarely rejected the argument that the trial
court’s supplementation of its $642,000 fine for past
disobedience with a “prospective fine schedule that [a] union
could avoid through compliance” for “conduct that can recur”
rendered the fines “civil in character.” Bagwell, 

. What mattered was “the character of the entire
decree.” 

.
                              46
     The Court’s recent decision in Department of Homeland
Security v. D.V.D., No. 24A1153, 

 (July 3,
2025), did not disturb that precedent. Respondents in that case
argued that the district court’s remedial order “effectively
operates as a remedy for civil contempt” of a stayed order. 

 (emphasis added). Accepting that characterization
arguendo, the Court agreed that the district court could not
pursue civil contempt for the stayed order any more than it
could had the order been vacated. See 

 (citing Mine Workers,

); see also supra Section II.A. But here, as
Judge Rao acknowledges, the district court is “us[ing] its
criminal contempt power,” Rao Op. 10 n.3, and D.V.D. does
“not dispute that ‘[v]iolations of an order are punishable as
criminal contempt even though the order is set aside on
appeal.’” 

, at *3 n.1 (Sotomayor, J.,
dissenting) (quoting Mine Workers, 

).

     There is no clear precedent or other indisputable legal
support for the notion that the presence of the “purge” option
here deprived the court of power—power that Judge Rao does
not otherwise question—to make a finding of probable cause
of criminal contempt and order defendants to respond. Indeed,
the contrary rule is well established.

     The right to relief is only “clear and indisputable” when a
petitioner can identify relevant precedent providing relief in
analogous circumstances. See Al Baluchi, 

.
Judge Rao acknowledges no case exists in which a federal court
has invalidated an order as presenting an impermissible civil
contempt sanction as if it were an allowable criminal contempt
inquiry. She chalks that up to the paucity of district courts
“threaten[ing] criminal contempt against Executive Branch
officials.” Rao Op. 15. But nothing in her contempt analysis
turns on the potential contemnors’ official status. The absence
of any supportive precedent involving even private parties
                               47
defeating a criminal contempt inquiry for including an
opportunity to avoid it through mitigation suffices to foreclose
mandamus relief. The flaw Judge Rao sees cannot support
mandamus because “open questions . . . are the antithesis of the
‘clear and indisputable’ right needed for mandamus relief.” In
re al-Nashiri, 

 (D.C. Cir. 2015). Nor is
mandamus justified to correct “innovations that exceed the
judicial power,” Rao Op. 15 n.5, given that the Supreme Court
has confirmed the authority of courts to pursue criminal
contempt while offering leniency to contemnors.

     Judge Rao sees other support for her understanding of the
order as a civil contempt in criminal clothing. She points to the
district court’s decisions to file its probable-cause
Memorandum and Order on the same docket as the civil case,
and to solicit briefing and argument from plaintiffs as well as
defendants, which she calls the “hallmarks of civil contempt.”
Rao Op. 7. When criminal contempt proceedings arise from
conduct in civil cases, however, courts’ show-cause orders to
putative contemnors are often reflected on the civil docket of
the case in which the contempt occurred. Only if a criminal
prosecution is initiated does the court direct filings, including
the criminal indictment, to a separate criminal docket. See,
e.g., Chevron Corp. v. Donziger, No. 11-cv-00691, Dkt. No.
2276 (S.D.N.Y. July 31, 2019) (“Order to Show Cause Why
Defendant Steven Donziger Should Not Be Held in Criminal
Contempt”); 

 Dkt. No. 2291 (S.D.N.Y. Aug. 5, 2019) (“The
Clerk shall assign a criminal docket number to proceedings
with respect to the criminal contempt proceeding.”).

     Criminal contempt, like other crimes, is a wrong against
the public, not just the immediate victim. But it is not unusual
to invite briefing from private parties to a civil case in which
potential contempt occurred as to whether to initiate a criminal
contempt inquiry. See, e.g., In re Res. Tech. Corp., No. 8-cv-
                              48
4040, Dkt. No. 45 (N.D. Ill. Sept. 15, 2008) (“Motion by
Trustee . . . for rule to show cause why [parties] should not be
held in criminal contempt.”). That practice helps ensure the
court’s decision is informed by persons familiar with the
context and the players and likely to have witnessed the
conduct at issue. None of the district court’s procedural
choices converts the Order into an effective use of civil
contempt without jurisdictional basis.

     Finally, even if issuing a writ of mandamus were
appropriate in this case, we are bound to limit the relief to
whatever is “no more burdensome . . . than necessary to provide
complete relief.” Rao Op. 18 (quoting Trump v. CASA, Inc.¸

, 2557 (2025)). Complete relief from what
Judge Rao sees as an unlawful choice requires no more than
vacatur of the purportedly objectionable “purge” option, which
would leave the district court where Judge Rao says it should
be: “squarely fac[ing] the difficult questions that would arise
from initiating criminal contempt against senior Executive
Branch officials.” Rao Op. 19. Judge Rao is right that “we do
not grant the government’s request to terminate the criminal
contempt proceedings,” Rao Op. 18, yet she gratuitously
vacates the entire order—including the requirement that
defendants identify the persons involved in the decisions at the
heart of the criminal contempt proceeding. The only defense
she offers of such broad intrusion into the district court’s
legitimate exercise of its acknowledged jurisdiction to consider
criminal contempt is that “the harm was putting the
government to an unlawful choice.” Rao Op. 18. Invalidating
the “purge” option eliminates the choice. Even if I were to
agree with the entirety of Judge Rao’s analysis in support of
mandamus, I cannot see how it supports an order that does
more than that.
                              49
                             ***

    For all the above reasons, defendants have not satisfied the
demanding requirements for a writ of mandamus vacating the
probable-cause order. We should deny their petition.

                              III.

     Chief Judge Boasberg was called on a weekend evening to
adjudicate an emergency application to temporarily restrain
United States officials from carrying out an unprecedented
operation to ship hundreds of people to El Salvador to be
indefinitely confined in one of the world’s most brutal prisons.
On short notice, he entered a TRO to pause that operation until
a full hearing could be held to determine whether the operation
could proceed while its legality was litigated. Unrestrained,
defendants shipped off the plaintiffs to a terrible fate based
solely on the executive branch’s unilateral and unsupported
assertion that they are members of Tren de Aragua. Their
designation has legal significance only because the executive
branch has unilaterally deemed their very presence in the
United States an “invasion” by a foreign government—even
though TdA is a criminal gang, has not been established to act
on behalf of the government of Venezuela, and each supposed
“gang member” was secured in ICE detention at the time.

    Chief Judge Boasberg faced immense pressure to make a
quick decision in a rapidly evolving, high-stakes situation. He
performed that task calmly and with an even hand, bringing to
bear his skill and wisdom as an experienced jurist. Even when
faced with what reasonably appeared to him to be foot
dragging, evasion, and outright disregard for his jurisdiction
and his orders, he responded with unfailing composure. The
majority does an exemplary judge a grave disservice by
                               50
overstepping its bounds to upend his effort to vindicate the
judicial authority that is our shared trust.

      “[I]t is a foundational legal precept that every judicial
order ‘must be obeyed’—no matter how ‘erroneous’ it ‘may
be’—until a court reverses it.” J.G.G., 

, at
*1 (quoting Walker, 388 U.S. at 314) (emphasis in original).
That rule “reflects a belief that in the fair administration of
justice no man can be judge in his own case,” no matter how
“exalted his station” or “righteous his motives.” Walker, 388
U.S. at 320-21. The rule of law means those principles apply
to officials in the executive branch just as they apply to all of
us. Defendants have not satisfied the exacting standards for
mandamus relief. I would therefore deny their petition.
Because my colleagues grant defendants that relief and, in
doing so, cut short an entirely lawful and regular process to
determine accountability for violation of a court order, I
respectfully dissent.