Julie T. Le, a former government lawyer whose outburst in court last month over the torrent of litigation generated by the immigration crackdown in Minnesota drew national attention, said she plans to run for Congress.
Ms. Le, 47, was part of a team of government lawyers tasked with responding to numerous lawsuits filed by immigrants challenging the legality of their detentions when she told a judge that she had reached a breaking point.
During a hearing in federal court in St. Paul, Ms. Le said she wished a judge would hold her in contempt and send her to jail “so that I can have a full 24 hours of sleep.” Breaking with the decorum government litigators generally display in open court, she told the judge: “The system sucks. This job sucks.”
This week, Ms. Le announced that she had left her job and aspired to fix the immigration “system’s failures” as a lawmaker. She is running for the seat held by Representative Ilhan Omar, a Democrat who has served in Congress since 2019.
Ms. Le, who has never run for elective office and has not been a high-profile figure in Democratic politics in Minnesota, could struggle to pose a formidable challenge to Ms. Omar, who has broad name recognition and a strong donor base in her heavily Democratic district, which includes Minneapolis.
Ms. Omar, who came to the United States as a refugee from Somalia, narrowly defeated a primary challenger in 2022.
Ms. Le said in an interview on Wednesday that she would be a more moderate lawmaker than Ms. Omar, who has called for abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Ms. Le said she began working at the immigration agency last year, partly because she was curious to see how it operated from the inside and because she wanted to help find ways to enforce the law in an evenhanded manner.
But the deployment of thousands of agents in Minnesota had been deeply unsettling, she said, leading her to coach her three teenagers on how to answer questions from ICE agents.
“Even as a U.S. citizen, I was afraid that we could be detained based on how we look,” said Ms. Le, who was born in Vietnam.
Representatives at the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to an email seeking comment. Ms. Omar’s spokeswoman, Jackie Rogers, declined to comment. The Minnesota primary election is Aug. 11.
Until recently, Ms. Le served as an assistant chief counsel at the Department of Homeland Security in Minnesota, representing ICE in immigration court. She held that job for less than a year, she said.
For a brief period this year, she was temporarily assigned to work at the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota, which has been hamstrung by an exodus of experienced litigators who quit in protest over the federal immigration operation in the state.
During the hearing in February, Judge Jerry W. Blackwell expressed frustration over the number of court orders the government had failed to heed in previous weeks. Many were orders for the release of immigrants who had been arrested in chaotic and, at times, violent operations.
In the hearing, Ms. Le told the judge that she was struggling to get ICE officials to acknowledge and abide by court orders. She also expressed fear that her own relatives could be targeted by the thousands of immigration agents in the state at the time.
On her campaign website, Ms. Le said her government roles had given her deep insight into immigration law.
“It’s a very complicated system,” she said. Overhauling it, she added, will require “a long process of negotiating and compromising.”
Ernesto Londoño is a Times reporter based in Minnesota, covering news in the Midwest and drug use and counternarcotics policy. He welcomes tips and can be reached at elondono.81 on Signal.
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