The Trump administration says it has begun to scale back some of its immigration enforcement efforts in the Minneapolis region. But the massive strain the crackdown has placed on the area’s courts and law enforcement is likely to linger for months to come.
Government lawyers are buckling under a crush of hundreds of cases, including scores of challenges filed by migrants who say they are being illegally detained. Federal judges are running out of patience with what they describe as the Trump administration’s repeated flouting of court orders. And immigration attorneys say they are drowning amid near constant pleas from noncitizens seeking help.
A government lawyer’s comment to a federal judge in Minnesota this week that she was so exhausted with her workload that being jailed might be preferable attracted nationwide attention as an unusually stark sign of those pressures.
“Sometimes I wish you would just hold me in contempt, your honor, so that I could have a full 24 hours of sleep,” said Julie T. Le, who had been temporarily assigned to the U.S. attorney’s office in Minneapolis to help respond to the torrent of new filings.
“The system sucks,” Le said later in the hearing Tuesday. “This job sucks.”
Le was removed from her role after that outburst, administration officials said. But hers was hardly the only voice expressing deep frustration in recent days.
Last week, Minnesota’s chief federal judge, Patrick J. Schiltz, threatened to hold the head of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in contempt, accusing ICE of violating 96 court orders in January alone — more, the judge noted, “than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence.”
He later backed off his contempt threat after the government released an Ecuadorian man who the judge said had been illegally locked up for more than two weeks. But Schiltz noted that he and the district’s other judges — all facing a glut of new cases — had already shown the administration extraordinary patience despite its decision “to send thousands of agents to Minnesota to detain aliens without making any provision for the hundreds of … lawsuits that were sure to result.”
Now, though, Schiltz wrote: “The court’s patience is at an end.”
Much of the crush of new cases has been driven by the Trump administration’s decision to buck years of legal precedent and assert that mandatory detention is required for all immigrants facing deportation. Before, ICE typically denied bond only to those who had been taken into custody after recently arriving at the border.
An overwhelming majority of judges who have considered the issue — including many of President Donald Trump’s appointees — have ruled that the policy is unlawful and that noncitizens must be provided a chance to seek their release on bond while awaiting removal proceedings.
Administration officials say the judges’ refusal to accept its legal position has created the crisis in the courts.
“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 DHS following orders,” Natalie Baldassarre, a Justice Department spokeswoman, said in a statement.
“After four years of de facto amnesty under the previous administration, the Trump Administration is complying with court orders and fully enforcing federal immigration law,” Baldassarre said.
The administration’s legal stance has spawned a surge of court challenges, known as habeas petitions, from detained migrants seeking release.
The issue has reached a crisis point in and around Minneapolis, where the administration’s concentrated immigration crackdown — dubbed “Operation Metro Surge” — has deployed thousands of officers and agents and swept up scores of migrants.
More than 427 habeas petitions were filed in Minnesota in January alone, Daniel Rosen, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney in the state, said in a recent court filing. In previous months, the number of such filings rarely reached more than 10 per month, according to a Washington Post analysis of court dockets.
Keeping up with that torrent has placed a “crushing burden” on his office of government attorneys who have been working around-the-clock for weeks to respond to new cases from immigrants and increasingly testy orders from the courts, Rosen said.
“This office has been forced to shift its already limited resources from other pressing and important priorities,” Rosen wrote, saying his already small staff had in recent weeks effectively abandoned other key areas of their work, including some criminal matters, and was now “operating in a reactive mode.”
Federal prosecutors are facing “daily” grilling from the courts, Rosen wrote, as judges demand to know why immigration authorities appear to be ignoring orders to release certain migrants or disregarding those barring the removal of others from the state. In many cases, those government lawyers have told judges that they, too, have struggled to get answers out of ICE.
“Lawyers for the government haven’t been able to keep up with the logistics of following the orders to release people, to not send people to Texas, which ICE has been doing for the last several weeks,” said Graham Ojala-Barbour, an immigration lawyer based in St. Paul.
The issue continued to boil this week, with U.S. District Judge Jerry W. Blackwell writing Monday that the Trump administration has demonstrated “persistent noncompliance” with court orders in Minnesota.
Blackwell, who was appointed to the bench by President Joe Biden in 2022, expressed alarm in a case involving someone else whom the courts had ordered released. In addition to not releasing the person, Blackwell wrote, the administration repeatedly ignored deadlines to file materials with the court and failed to comply with other judicial directives.
“It is past time for such noncompliance to end,” Blackwell wrote. He ordered Le, the government lawyer, to appear at a court hearing on Tuesday afternoon in St. Paul to address the issue.
Noting that the volume of detentions was “not a justification for diluting constitutional rights,” Blackwell peppered Le with questions, leading to her extraordinarily candid remarks.
She described working as an ICE attorney within the Department of Homeland Security before “stupidly” volunteering in January for a special mission with the Minneapolis U.S. attorney’s office to help them address the high volume of habeas claims.
When this assignment began in early January, Le told Blackwell, she was initially given no real guidance or direction and had to tag along with other attorneys to learn what to do. She also described difficulties accessing emails sent to her Justice Department account.
Addressing the judge, Le repeatedly expressed unease and fatigue, portraying her work as an around-the-clock labor to try to help other federal officials address court orders and get people released as directed.
The “procedure in place right now sucks,” she said, according to the court transcript. “I’m trying to fix it.”
She described being up until the middle of the night to get documents ready for Blackwell ahead of the hearing and struggling to address flawed systems. Le wanted to resolve things, she said, because nobody wanted to be in jail.
Le then added that being in jail for a day to “catch up with sleep is not bad right now with all the hours I have to put in into this job.”
Shortly after that hearing, the Justice Department removed Le from her temporary assignment to the Minneapolis U.S. attorney’s office, a department spokesperson said.
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, of which ICE is a part, described Le’s conduct in a statement as “unprofessional and unbecoming of an ICE attorney.”
Le did not respond to a message Thursday seeking comment on her remarks to Blackwell.
correctionA previous version of this article misspelled the last name of Minnesota’s chief federal judge, Patrick J. Schiltz.
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