A federal prosecutor in Minneapolis was fired from the U.S. attorney’s office on Wednesday after she expressed exasperation with the crippling case load arising from the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration crackdown, according to three people familiar with the matter.
In an extraordinary outburst, the prosecutor, Julie T. Le, told a judge during a hearing on Tuesday in Federal District Court in St. Paul that she and her colleagues in the local U.S. attorney’s office were completely overwhelmed by the number of cases they had been forced to handle because of the White House’s widespread immigration sweeps in Minnesota.
Ms. Le’s painfully personal remarks came as the judge, Jerry W. Blackwell, was grilling her about why she and other prosecutors had ignored his orders in five separate cases to free immigrants he had determined were illegally detained by federal agents.
“What do you want me to do?” Ms. Le asked the judge at one point. “The system sucks. This job sucks. And I am trying every breath that I have so that I can get you what you need.”
“Fixing a system, a broken system,” she went on, “I don’t have a magic button to do it. I don’t have the power or the voice to do it. I only can do it within the ability and the capacity that I have.”
Ms. Le, who works as a lawyer for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, volunteered in January to join the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota to handle the deluge of cases filed by immigrants challenging their arrests by federal agents. Over the next several weeks, she found herself overseeing about 90 immigration cases.
After her remarks in court, Ms. Le’s temporary post at the U.S. attorney’s office was ended, according to the people familiar with the matter. It remained unclear whether she had also been fired from her job at ICE.
The episode involving Ms. Le opened a revealing window on how the federal courts in Minnesota have reached a breaking point and are buckling under the weight of hundreds of cases arising from the statewide immigration campaign the Trump administration has called Operation Metro Surge.
The turmoil in the courts has demoralized prosecutors, outraged judges, exhausted defense lawyers — and, all the while, left scores of immigrants languishing in detention in violation of both judicial orders and their constitutional rights.
“The D.O.J., the D.H.S., and ICE are not above the law,” Judge Blackwell said during the hearing on Tuesday. “They do wield extraordinary power, and that power has to exist within constitutional limits. When court orders are not followed, it’s not just the court’s authority that’s at issue. It is the rights of individuals in custody and the integrity of the constitutional system itself.”
Alan Feuer covers extremism and political violence for The Times, focusing on the criminal cases involving the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and against former President Donald J. Trump.
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