A federal judge in Washington, D.C., is holding the Trump administration in criminal contempt for ignoring his order, issued last month, to turn around multiple planes carrying Venezuelan migrants that were being deported without due process through the president’s unprecedented use of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 (AEA).

U.S. District Judge James Boasberg on Wednesday said he had determined that the federal government demonstrated a “willful disregard” for his order “sufficient for the Court to conclude that probable cause exists to find the Government in criminal contempt.”

“The Court does not reach such conclusion lightly or hastily; indeed, it has given Defendants ample opportunity to rectify or explain their actions. None of their responses has been satisfactory,” Boasberg wrote in a 46-page order. “The Constitution does not tolerate willful disobedience of judicial orders — especially by officials of a coordinate branch who have sworn an oath to uphold it. To permit such officials to freely ‘annul the judgments of the courts of the United States’ would not just ‘destroy the rights acquired under those judgments’; it would make ‘a solemn mockery’ of ‘the constitution itself.’ ‘So fatal a result must be deprecated by all.””

On March 15, the ACLU sued for — and won — a temporary restraining order barring the administration from deporting individuals under the AEA. During the emergency hearing, Boasberg issued an oral bench ruling to cease removals under the auspices of the AEA along with a directive to turn planes around containing Venezuelan migrants that had taken off shortly before the proceedings and return them to the U.S. — an order that was infamously ignored.

The government claimed that the flights had already left U.S. airspace and were therefore outside of the court’s jurisdiction. Administration officials also asserted that they did not have to follow Boasberg’s oral order to turn the planes around because he did not memorialize the directive in his subsequent written order.