The judge was angry. She had ordered a detained immigrant to be released in Minnesota, but instead he was let go in El Paso, where he had to spend the night in a shelter. All his property was supposed to have been returned, but the government was still holding his identity papers.
“Why should I not hold you in contempt?” the judge asked a Justice Department lawyer at a hearing last week. Instead of answers, she got excuses.
“I don’t think there was ever any intention to defy the court orders,” said the lawyer, Matthew Isihara, a military judge advocate on temporary assignment to the Justice Department. “We were doing our best and things, unfortunately, slipped — slipped through the cracks.”
That explanation was not enough for Judge Laura M. Provinzino of the Federal District Court for the District of Minnesota. Last Wednesday, she found Mr. Isihara in civil contempt of court.
Legal experts said her ruling marked the first time during President Trump’s second term that a judge had attempted to assert authority by issuing a civil contempt ruling, which enforces a judicial order by imposing a penalty until the offending party complies. In this case, Judge Provinzino ordered Mr. Ishiara to pay $500 a day until the identity documents were returned.
But the anger Judge Provinzino flashed at Mr. Isihara has been repeated in courtrooms across the country amid Mr. Trump’s drive to deport large numbers of immigrants. A New York Times review of federal dockets found at least 35 instances since August in which federal district court or magistrate judges issued an order requiring the government to explain why it should not be similarly punished for violating court orders, essentially giving officials one last chance to explain themselves.
Those so-called “show cause” orders came from judges in California, Texas, Florida, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, West Virginia and Puerto Rico. They all arose from cases in which the government had detained immigrants who had been living in the United States for years after entering the country illegally.
They represent the culmination of weeks of frustration from the bench. Judges have castigated administration officials for testifying dishonestly, representing the law inaccurately, and above all, failing to comply promptly with their orders.
Experts said that judges appeared to be grappling with a key question: Could the violations of court orders be explained merely by the stress on the legal system caused by the recent flood of immigration cases? Or is there a more systematic effort by the government to defy the courts?
“Don’t hide the ball,” wrote Judge Roy Dalton Jr. in Florida, complaining that a Justice Department lawyer had failed to fully explain relevant law in one case.
“Antiseptic judicial rhetoric cannot do justice to what is happening,” Judge Joseph R. Goodwin in West Virginia wrote in another, calling the warrantless arrest and imprisonment of thousands across the country “an assault on the constitutional order.”
In a statement, Natalie Baldassarre, a Justice Department spokeswoman, blamed “rogue judges” whom she accused of not following the law for allowing the high case loads.
The Trump administration, Ms. Baldassarre said, was “complying with court orders and fully enforcing federal immigration law.”
At first, the complaints were concentrated in Minnesota, where the federal bench has had to deal with the legal aftermath of Mr. Trump’s surge of immigration agents. But they have since spread. In New Jersey alone, the Justice Department admitted last week that it had violated judicial orders 52 times in immigration detention cases since Dec. 5.
In court, Justice Department lawyers have generally responded like Mr. Isihara, with respectful apologies and beleaguered references to their workloads.
But in some of their internal communications, the Justice Department’s leadership in Washington has taken a different posture, people familiar with them have said. During a call late last month with representatives from many of the nation’s 93 U.S. attorneys’ offices, Aakash Singh, an associate deputy attorney general, complained that judges’ filing deadlines in detention cases were “unrealistic,” and that some of their rulings were “crazy,” said a person familiar with the call who was granted anonymity to provide an account of an internal communication.
And while Mr. Singh mentioned that the department planned to appeal some rulings, he also sounded a defiant note.
“I want to just stress that an adverse decision from a judge is not a reason to stop doing what you know to be right,” Mr. Singh said. “We are the ones charged with keeping America safe.”
Publicly too, the department has at times dismissed the significance of unfavorable rulings.
“Judge Provinzino’s order is a lawless abuse of judicial power,” Daniel N. Rosen, the U.S. attorney in Minnesota, wrote in an emailed statement on the night of the contempt ruling.
Despite the aggressive rhetoric, the Justice Department decided to back down in Judge Provinzino’s case. Last Thursday, the detainee’s lawyer received an overnight FedEx package containing the missing identity documents. In response, the judge lifted her contempt order.
Mr. Trump’s sweeping raids have generated a flood of immigration cases in the federal courts. So too has a new administration policy of holding immigrants without bond. Before, immigrants were usually released on bond if they were not deemed a flight risk or danger to the community.
As a result of the change, thousands of detainees have gone to the federal courts to challenge the legality of their detentions by filing what are known as habeas corpus petitions.
That pileup has been aggravated by a Justice Department staffing shortage so severe that some administration allies are publicly soliciting job applications from prospective prosecutors. The Justice Department has borrowed lawyers from the Department of Homeland Security, and in Mr. Isihara’s case, the military.
On the call with U.S. attorneys’ offices, Mr. Singh said the department was trying to get more staffing. But in the meantime, he said, lawyers should expect to be working nights and weekends. As of Friday, Mr. Isihara alone was responsible for 104 detention cases over the past month in Minnesota, according to a search of the court’s electronic case-filing system.
In written opinions and comments from the bench, judges have said repeatedly that they find the gripes about workload insufficient to excuse false representations and missed deadlines.
In a sweeping order that demanded the government allow tens of thousands of detainees the means to challenge their detentions, Judge Sunshine S. Sykes in California noted that the volume of work was driven by the administration’s own policies. Officials “have chosen to avail themselves of these exact circumstances of which they now complain,” she wrote.
Noah Feldman, a Harvard law professor, said that judges appear to be assessing the possibility that the administration is purposely defying its orders and, if so, what to do about it.
“We’re at a moment where the courts are trying to figure out whether the Trump administration is systematically ignoring court orders, or whether it’s a function of overload plus incompetence plus an attitude of disrespect,” he said.
For now, said David A. Super, a Georgetown University law professor, the government’s lawyers were going to have to deal with their diminished credibility in the eyes of the bench. “Judges are understanding about individual shortcomings,” he said. “They’re less understanding about systems that aren’t even trying to get it right.”
‘This is just not sustainable.’
The number of court challenges to immigration detention has skyrocketed since last summer, when the Department of Homeland Security began holding immigrants without bond.
Judge Sykes, in central California, noted that her district had received 551 petitions over a five-week span. A judge in New Jersey found 547 petitions had been filed over nine weeks there. A judge in the Western District of Texas said that as of Jan. 29, there were 134 active cases, with another 20 to 25 arriving each week.
The influx has put “a tremendous strain on the resources” of the legal system, wrote Judge Tiffany M. Cartwright in Washington State. It has forced “hurried and frustrating hearings,” wrote Judge George L. Russell III in Maryland. Judge Clay D. Land, in Georgia, wrote that the situation had become “an administrative judicial emergency.”
In an email, Judge Elizabeth A. Wolford, the chief of the Federal District Court for the Western District of New York, said that the volume of habeas petitions in her district, which has only four judges on active status, had risen more than tenfold in the past six months, to roughly 100 filings each month. “This is just not sustainable,” she wrote.
Judges have been equally vocal in condemning the government’s failure to promptly comply with their orders.
“It’s not their job or temperament to seek confrontation with the executive branch,” said Professor Feldman. But, noting the unusually pointed judicial language, he added: “If they feel their orders are not being followed, they know that’s the definition of a challenge to the rule of law.”
Earlier this month, Judge Nusrat J. Choudhury of the Eastern District of New York assailed the Trump administration for not only defying two “clear and unambiguous orders,” but also offering “false” statements about the whereabouts of a man Immigration and Customs Enforcement had detained on Long Island during a routine check-in.
Six days after she prohibited the government from moving the man outside the metro area, Judge Choudhury wrote, the government placed him on a flight to Texas, then into detention in New Mexico. Two days later, she wrote, an ICE official submitted a declaration giving her a false assurance that the man was still in New Jersey and would be present at a hearing she had called for the following day to consider his release.
When the man, still held in New Mexico, missed that hearing, she tallied two separate violations of her orders and told the government to return him to Long Island and release him.
Judge Choudhury, an appointee of President Joseph R. Biden Jr., wrote that she considered holding officials in contempt over the violations, but decided against it because the detainee could not afford to pay a lawyer to file a motion, court filings show.
In an opinion last October, Judge David Briones of the Western District of Texas complained that a man he had ordered to not be removed from his district had been abruptly sent to Arizona and deported to Mexico the next day. Judge Briones, a Clinton appointee, urged the Justice Department to tighten up its coordination with the Department of Homeland Security, to fix “inconsequential lapses that lead to irreparable consequences for parties and violations of court orders.”
Further mistakes, he added, “may lead to sanctions or criminal contempt.”
In the Northern District of California last Tuesday, a judge held a hearing to consider holding ICE officials in contempt after they fast-tracked the deportation of a woman in spite of three separate court orders prohibiting the government from doing so. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, an Obama appointee, did not immediately rule on whether to hand down punishments.
Last Friday, Judge Provinzino agreed not to impose fines in her Minnesota case, since the former detainee’s identity documents had been returned.
But her forbearance had a limit, and the government, she said, was approaching it. She cited 10 other cases from January and February in which the Justice Department had come before her district’s bench and pleaded for leniency.
“The refrain of ‘understaffing’ and ‘too many cases’ has worn out its welcome, particularly when it comes at the expense of individual rights,” she wrote.
She noted her own service for more than a decade as a federal prosecutor in the same Minnesota district, saying she empathized with Mr. Isihara’s predicament. “But going forward,” she wrote, “ the goal should be ‘100 percent compliance with judicial orders.’”
Judge Provinzino concluded by drawing a red line: “What the court will not tolerate is what happened here: disobedience and radio silence from the government.”
Seamus Hughes contributed research.
Zach Montague is a Times reporter covering the federal courts, including the legal disputes over the Trump administration’s agenda.
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