The Justice Department attorney who made headlines for telling a federal judge “this job sucks” at a hearing on President Donald Trump’s immigration arrests in Minnesota says she is planning to run for Congress in November.
In her now-famous outburst, Julie T. Le told U.S. District Judge Jerry W. Blackwell that she felt powerless to compel U.S. immigration officers to follow judicial orders to grant immigrants bond hearings or release them from detention. Blackwell had summoned her and a colleague to court to demand an explanation, or face contempt.
As Le stalked out of the courtroom, she said it flashed across her mind that only legislators had the power to fix the enforcement system that had ignited fear and violence throughout the Twin Cities.
“I was like, ‘Okay, I’m an attorney. I can’t do much at all,’” Le, 47, said in an interview. “Legislators are the only ones that can change the law, or update the laws, or do something, so that we can have this under control.”
Le was fired by the Trump administration within hours of her outburst. Now she is preparing to launch a campaign to run for Congress as a Democrat, challenging Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota).
Le is one of several former officials critical of Trump to seek public office. Others include a fired federal prosecutor running for the House in Virginia, a former U.S. Capitol Police officer seeking a House seat in Maryland, and twin brothers and former Army officers who raised alarms about the issues at the heart of Trump’s first impeachment. All are Democrats.
“It’s not because she’s not doing the job,” Le, a married mother of three, said of her decision to challenge Omar. “It’s just for what I could bring to the table.”
Le said she plans to formally announce her congressional run Saturday in the Minneapolis suburb of Brooklyn Park. Her top priorities will be comprehensive immigration reform, with a mix of pathways to legal residency and enforcement; expanding financial aid for college, which allowed her to finish school; providing robust funding for arts, music and other programs at public K-12 schools; and improving access to health care.
Le said she had considered a public role for years to cap a life that began in communist Vietnam, where her maternal grandfather died in prison for his role in aiding U.S. forces. Her family escaped to a refugee camp in the Philippines and, after several months, they were admitted to the United States as refugees in 1993, carrying just two boxes of belongings.
She was 14 when she arrived, the only daughter of seven children to parents who settled in Iowa to work as cutters in meatpacking plants. She enrolled in school and learned English with the help of the ABC sitcom “Full House.”
Le started her legal career two decades after graduating from high school, and after stints working as a nursing home aide and insurance claims adjuster, among other jobs. After she graduated from law school in 2019, she worked in private practice. Then in 2024, Gov. Tim Walz (D) appointed her to the Minnesota Board of School Administrators, which licenses school leaders.
She resigned from the board in April 2025 to work as an Immigration and Customs Enforcement prosecutor arguing in immigration court that criminals or people ineligible for asylum or other benefits should be deported. She said she was proud to work for ICE and to protect the U.S.
“That’s the law,” she said. “You apply the law to everyone. Everyone has to follow it.”
But Le said she had never voted for Trump and opposed his brash enforcement style. In Minnesota and nationally, immigration officers smashed windows, tossed tear gas and, critics said, appeared to arrest people based on the color of their skin. In Minneapolis, federal officers shot and killed two U.S. citizens protesting the arrests.
Federal courts were swamped with lawsuits challenging the detentions, including during Trump’s Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota, the largest raid yet.
Le said she had volunteered to assist her colleagues at the Justice Department who were overwhelmed trying to defend the government in those lawsuits.
But she said she began to fear that her own family could be arrested because of their skin color. At the Feb. 3 hearing, Blackwell pressed her and attorney Ana Voss, who has also left the department, saying the workload was of the government’s own making. Surging officers to make mass arrests without beefing up government attorney staffing and the courts meant that immigrants who should not have been arrested were still in detention after a judge had ordered them freed.
Le agreed with him. “And every case I touch, I give it 100 percent,” she told the judge, according to the court transcript. “They [are] all important to me.”
But the strain was showing. She worked day and night, frustrated by colleagues who kept telling her the system was “broken” and nothing could fix it.
She half-jokingly told the judge that being held in contempt and thrown in jail actually might be a break from her crushing workload.
“Ms. Le, I appreciate your candor,” Blackwell said.
In the interview, Le said she had dozens of cases and recalled one involving a man named Fernando who looked like he could be one of her relatives. She stayed at ICE, she said, in part because if anyone got arrested she thought she’d be in a better position to prove that they were here legally.
“Which just sucks,” she added. “And I should not be doing that because my kids were born here in the United States.”
Le said she had considered waiting to run for public office until after her children finished school. One is in college studying to be a physician assistant and the other two are in high school. She said she was content to serve as the director of the Vietnamese choir at her Catholic church.
“Then boom, this thing happened, right?” she said.
After the hearing before Blackwell, DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin told media outlets that Le’s behavior was unprofessional, and Le said her ICE supervisor soon fired her.
Le said she did not regret the outburst, saying “it is what it is.” She said she told the truth.
“This is me. This is who I am; I am not a perfect individual,” she said. “But I will always give it the best.”
Teo Armus contributed to this report.
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