When it all became too much — the crippling case load, the lack of training and, most of all, the immigrants themselves who had been languishing in jail — Julie T. Le let loose in front of the judge.
Ms. Le, a prosecutor for the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota, knew that he was angry. She understood that she and her colleagues had violated his orders to release people illegally detained in the state last month. But she had already tried to quit her job, and no one would replace her, so what else could she do?
“The system sucks. This job sucks,” Ms. Le exclaimed. While she wanted to improve things, she was just one person, she explained, working around the clock to grapple with the onslaught of cases stemming from the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
“Fixing a system, a broken system, I don’t have a magic button to do it,” she said. “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’s outburst on Tuesday at a hearing in Federal District Court in St. Paul was an extraordinary expression of personal frustration from a lawyer on the front lines of the White House’s aggressive immigration sweeps.
The remarks cost her her job at the Justice Department, where she had been working on a temporary basis to help handle habeas corpus petitions, or court filings that compel the government to justify holding someone in custody. But they also opened a window onto a broader problem: how the courts in Minnesota are buckling beneath the weight of a deluge of cases arising from the statewide campaign that the administration has called Operation Metro Surge.
The turmoil in the courts has demoralized prosecutors, outraged judges, exhausted defense lawyers — and left many immigrants languishing in detention in violation of court orders.
“The individuals affected are people,” said Jerry W. Blackwell, the federal judge who convened Tuesday’s hearing. “They live in their communities. Some are separated from their families.”
When agencies like the Justice Department, the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement ignore judicial orders to release immigrants under their control, Judge Blackwell said, it is an affront not merely to personal liberty, but to the entire criminal justice system.
“The D.O.J., the D.H.S. and ICE are not above the law,” the judge declared. “They do wield extraordinary power, and that power has to exist within constitutional limits.”
The hearing was held so that Judge Blackwell could grill Ms. Le and her supervisor in the U.S. attorney’s office about why they had ignored his orders in cases in which he had determined that immigrants had been illegally detained by federal agents. While the men were all eventually released from federal custody, the judge wanted to get to the bottom of the government’s noncompliance in missing court-imposed deadlines.
Lawyers for some of the immigrants had asked him to hold the administration in contempt. And while Judge Blackwell did not immediately do so, Ms. Le, in a darkly sardonic moment, said she would not have minded if he did.
“I wish you would just hold me in contempt, Your Honor, so that I can have a full 24 hours of sleep,” she said.
“If rogue judges followed the law in adjudicating cases and respected the government’s obligation to properly prepare cases, there wouldn’t be an ‘overwhelming’ habeas caseload or concern over D.H.S. following orders,” said Natalie Baldassarre, a Justice Department spokeswoman. “The level of illegal aliens currently detained is a direct result of this administration’s strong border security policies to keep the American people safe.”
The increasingly loud warnings that the Trump administration’s immigration policies are overloading the federal judiciary extend beyond Judge Blackwell’s courtroom.
Last week, Patrick J. Schiltz, the chief federal judge in Minnesota, excoriated the administration for what he said were nearly 100 violations of court orders stemming from the Homeland Security Department’s aggressive crackdown in Minneapolis, which has led to the fatal shootings of two protesters at the hands of federal agents.
But a growing chorus of judges around the country have also raised concerns about the wave of cases brought on by the government’s immigration raids.
In the Western District of Texas, Judge Leon Schydlower noted that as of last week, 134 habeas cases related to immigrants were pending in his court, and 20 to 25 new ones were arriving each week.
In West Virginia, Judge Joseph R. Goodwin used a ruling late last month ordering the release of a Venezuelan immigrant to complain about the wider problem of immigrants being held in violation of their rights.
“Individuals are stopped during ordinary civilian activity, taken into custody for civil immigration purposes and confined in local jails without prompt hearings, without individualized findings and often far from counsel, family or community,” he wrote.
Two days after Judge Goodwin issued his order, Judge Fred Biery, of the Western District of Texas, issued his own fiery ruling that freed 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, who was arrested with his father in Minnesota. Judge Biery included a photo of Liam standing in the cold, wearing a blue bunny hat, as he was taken into custody.
But the situation has been particularly acute in Minnesota, where hundreds of immigrants have been arrested in recent weeks.
Paschal O. Nwokocha, an immigration lawyer in the state, said he and his staff had fought for weeks to keep track of their clients, refreshing an ICE detainee tracker for updates on their whereabouts. In one instance, he watched a client sent to El Paso via Torrance County, N.M., after a judge had ordered his release and return to Minnesota.
After the man was returned more than a week later, Judge John R. Tunheim noted that the government had “willfully violated the court’s orders” in failing to send the man back to Minnesota in time for a hearing.
“I feel so sorry for these lawyers because they are caught, because they can’t control what their clients are doing,” Mr. Nwokocha said, referring to the Justice Department lawyers representing the Trump administration.
At the federal courthouse in St. Paul on Tuesday, Judge Blackwell started the hearing by discussing the case of an immigrant named Oscar Olvidio Tot-Choc, whom he had ordered to be freed from custody on Jan. 15. But instead of immediately complying, ICE officials flew Mr. Tot-Choc first to El Paso and then to Albuquerque.
Finally, after repeated exhortations from the judge, Ms. Le told him that Mr. Tot-Choc would return to Minnesota as a free man on Jan. 27. Not long after, however, prosecutors asked for one more day to bring him back, saying there were “safety concerns” with his flight.
Judge Blackwell blamed overreach by the Trump administration for this chaos and confusion, saying that officials had failed to put enough legal “infrastructure” in place to “keep up with it all.”
Ms. Le bore the brunt of Judge Blackwell’s complaints even though she was not a career Justice Department lawyer. She told the judge that her main job was with ICE and that in January she had volunteered — “stupidly,” she said — to join federal prosecutors in Minnesota to handle the deluge of cases filed by immigrants challenging their arrests.
Over the next several weeks, she found herself overseeing about 90 immigration cases and claimed that she had received almost no instruction on how to handle them.
“So are you telling the court that you were brought in brand new, a shiny, brand-new penny into this role, and you received no proper orientation or training?” the judge asked.
Ms. Le said it was true.
She also shared a bit of her personal history, asserting that as an Asian woman she felt sympathy for the immigrants whose cases she was handling.
Eventually, she said, the job wore her down and she filed her resignation papers, but was asked to stay when her bosses could not find anyone to replace her.
“To be honest, Your Honor, I did put in for a request to be transferred back,” she said, “but no one was willing to come here to stand in front of you to explain and/or to help to improve the system.”
All she really wanted now was rest, she said, telling the judge that she had been working until 2:35 a.m. that day preparing for the hearing. She even made a morbid joke, saying that she might not mind being locked up for a while like the immigrants whose cases she was handling.
“I would love to undo all of this stuff because no one wants to be in jail,” she said. “And actually, honestly, you know, being in jail a day to catch up with sleep is not bad right now with all the hours I have to put into this job.”
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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