Deputy Associate Attorney General Abhishek Kambli Stonewalls Judge in Trump Administration’s Deportation Case

Deputy Associate Attorney General Abhishek Kambli defended the Trump administration invoking the Alien Enemies Act to deport more than 200 migrants to El Salvador this past weekend. In a court hearing today to determine whether the White House violated a court order in going ahead with the deportation, Kambli refused to answer questions from Chief U.S. District Judge James Boasberg.  Citing security and diplomatic concerns, Kambli told Judge Boasberg that he was authorized to provide only limited information. He told the judge that “the two flights that took off after the written order were not relevant to the Alien Enemies Act case,” as reported by Courthouse News Service. 

Kambli, a member of the Federalist Society, further argued that “Boasberg’s oral command wasn’t binding because the judge didn’t include the instruction about airborne flights in his written order,” Courthouse News Service said. “The court lost jurisdiction the moment the planes left U.S. airspace,” the news service quoted Kambli as saying. 

When Judge Boasberg, a Barack Obama appointee, asked Kambli if it would’ve been “a better course to return the planes around the United States as opposed to going forward,” Kambli told him , that’s not the approach that we’ve taken in this argument,” The Hill reported. The Judge has directed the Trump administration to provide more information on the flights by noon tomorrow.

The case was brought on March 15 by the by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of five Venezuelan migrants at risk of being deported. That’s when Boasberg ruled from the bench that the government immediately “turn around and return to the United States” any flights that had left the nation that day. “His written order ‘memorializing’ what he said orally, was docketed less than an hour later,” The Hill report said.

The March 15 hearing came less than an hour after Trump announced he would invoke the 1798 Alien Enemy Act to deport the Venezuelan migrants. The flights took the migrants to El Salvador, where they were quickly incarcerated in the notorious CECOT facility.

Kambli, who took over his role at the Department of Justice was most recently the Deputy Attorney General at the Kansas Attorney General’s Office where he led the Special Litigation and Constitutional Issues division. In that capacity he litigated the Kansas AG office’s most high impact cases, such as Kansas v. Biden (later renamed Alaska v. Department of Education). He was also lead counsel on Kansas v. Department of Education which enjoined the 2024 Title IX rule that expanded the definition “sex” to include gender identity under Title IX and Kansas v. Department of Labor. In addition, he was counsel of record on a 26-state amicus brief at the U.S. Supreme Court in Beals v. Virginia Coalition for Immigrant Rights, where the Court ultimately allowed the Commonwealth of Virginia to remove noncitizens from its voter role prior to the 2024 election.

See Also

Indian American Kush Desai Appointed White House Deputy Press Secretary

In a LinkedIn post last month, announcing his resignation from the state of Kansas, Kambli wrote that “leading the Special Litigation Division was the best job I ever had” He wished he had “more time to build upon all the work we had done, but there was another opportunity that came up that was also a calling I had to answer,” alluding to his current post.

Before working for the state of Kansas, Kambli was an assistant United States attorney prosecuting federal crimes within the Southern District of Indiana. He also served as a JAG officer in the United States Air Force where he still serves in the Reserves. He holds a juris doctorate from Notre Dame Law School.