A U.S. appeals court overturned on Friday a lower court’s ruling that found probable cause to hold Trump administration officials in contempt over their handling of the deportations of hundreds of Venezuelan migrants under a centuries-old wartime law.

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals also ordered Washington-based U.S. District Judge James Boasberg to hold further proceedings to decide whether the migrants may still press claims that their deportations to a prison in El Salvador violated their due process rights. The migrants were released last month.

The decision ending Boasberg’s contempt probe was a win for Republican President Donald Trump and his allies, who have argued some judges are overstepping their authority and thwarting the executive branch’s broad power to conduct foreign policy and law enforcement as it sees fit.

Boasberg found in April that officials could face criminal contempt charges for willfully disregarding his March 15 order barring the deportations to El Salvador of alleged Venezuelan gang members under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act without the chance to challenge their removals.

That ruling marked a dramatic escalation in a confrontation between the administration and the judiciary. Trump’s critics say his administration has demonstrated a willingness to ignore unfavorable orders from the courts, a co-equal branch of government under the U.S. Constitution.

On Friday, a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the government in its appeal of Boasberg’s ruling by a 2-1 vote. The majority found that Boasberg’s March order blocking the deportations was not clear enough to justify contempt proceedings against Trump officials for violating it.

“The District Court’s order raises troubling questions about judicial control over core executive functions like the conduct of foreign policy and the prosecution of criminal offenses,” Circuit Judge Gregory Katsas, who was appointed by Trump during his first term as president, wrote in an opinion.

In a post on X, Attorney General Pam Bondi called the ruling a “MAJOR victory” that affirmed the administration’s argument that Boasberg’s contempt probe was “failed judicial overreach at its worst.”

Circuit Judge Neomi Rao, also a Trump appointee, wrote a concurring opinion, with Circuit Judge Cornelia Pillard, an appointee of former Democratic President Barack Obama, dissenting.

“Our system of courts cannot long endure if disappointed litigants defy court orders with impunity rather than legally challenge them,” Pillard wrote.

Prisoner Swap

The contempt ruling stemmed from Boasberg’s order that the administration return to the U.S. hundreds of Venezuelans who had been swiftly deported to a prison in El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act, used to intern and deport people of Japanese, German and Italian descent during World War Two.

Lawyers for many of the deported men denied the Trump administration’s allegations that they were members of the Tren de Aragua gang and said they were never given the chance to contest those claims in court.

Last month, the 252 deported Venezuelans being held at El Salvador’s notorious CECOT maximum security prison were released and sent home to Venezuela as part of a coordinated prisoner exchange in which 10 Americans held in Venezuela returned to the United States.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which represents the migrants, said the appeals court was right to ask Boasberg to determine if the migrants still had a path to pursue their claims that their rights were violated. The ACLU has said some of the migrants wish to return to the U.S.

“No one should suffer what these men went through, being locked away in a notorious El Salvador prison for months on end with zero due process,” ACLU lawyer Lee Gelernt said in a statement.

(Reporting by Luc Cohen in New York and Andrew Goudsward in Washington; Editing by Mark Porter and Nia Williams)