In an appearance that left legal experts and political observers shaking their heads, U.S. Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) suggested on MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show that officials from the Trump administration could — and perhaps should — be arrested for “interfering with a legal proceeding,” which he bizarrely equated to “kidnapping.”
Raskin’s inflammatory comments come amid a broader Democratic campaign to canonize deported illegal immigrants as political martyrs. Chief among them is Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran national with alleged ties to the brutal MS-13 gang and human trafficking operations.
Despite Garcia’s documented criminal connections and a lawful removal order from an immigration judge, Democrats are demanding his return to the United States — and Raskin is leading the charge with rhetoric more suited to a street protest than a congressional office.
“I regard it very much within the prism of what we’ve been dealing with over the last month, which is an intense assault on judicial independence,” Raskin claimed, accusing the Trump administration of systematically disobeying court orders.
In a particularly audacious twist, Raskin then described Judge James Boasberg — an Obama appointee known for his left-leaning decisions — as a “conservative Republican,” a characterization that left even friendly audiences puzzled.
The core of Raskin’s grievance centers around a deeply flawed contempt proceeding initiated by Boasberg, who claimed the Trump administration defied his oral order not to deport a group of Venezuelan and Salvadoran gang members.
Notably, the ruling Boasberg sought to enforce had already been overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court — a critical detail pointed out by respected legal minds like Alan Dershowitz, who called the contempt effort legally questionable at best.
Undeterred, Raskin pressed the narrative that deporting violent gang members against a contested oral order amounted to criminal behavior on par with kidnapping. “On the logic of this arrest of Judge Dugan, all of the people in the Trump Administration who participated in defying that order by Judge Boasberg themselves could be arrested,” he declared, doubling down on an escalating lawfare campaign against political opponents.
It’s a stunning inversion of legal reasoning: equating lawful deportations — conducted after full immigration proceedings — with “kidnapping,” while ignoring the legitimate public safety threat posed by criminal elements like MS-13.
