The Trump administration has violated more than 50 orders from federal judges in the District of New Jersey, all in cases involving immigrants’ challenging the legality of their detention, according to a court-ordered review conducted by a senior Justice Department official.
The admission comes as federal judges around the country grapple with how best to address an emerging pattern of government noncompliance in immigration cases. Judges have castigated what they have described as the administration’s lawless approach in their rulings, summoned senior officials to their courtrooms to account for their lapses, and threatened to hold officials in contempt of court.
In the New Jersey case, Judge Michael E. Farbiarz, who was appointed by President Joseph R. Biden Jr., ordered the administration to detail every instance in which it had failed to comply with a judicial order in the district since Dec. 5.
In a response last week, Jordan Fox, the chief of staff to the deputy attorney general, filed an 11-page declaration describing 52 separate violations across 547 cases, describing them as accidental.
She wrote that detainees were transferred 17 times despite court orders prohibiting them from being moved. The moves took places “inadvertently due to logistical delays,” she wrote.
Another detainee, Jorge Moran-Rodriguez was flown to Peru in violation of a court order “due to an inadvertent administrative oversight” and then decided to stay “instead of return to the United States.”
Mr. Moran-Rodriguez’s lawyer clarified that he chose to stay to avoid being returned only to be held in U.S. detention. “It’s not that he didn’t want to come back to the U.S. necessarily,” said his lawyer, Franklin S. Montero, in an interview.
Mr. Montero also took issue with the government’s claim that its lapse was unintentional. “They knew they were not supposed to move Mr. Moran,” he said.
A Justice Department spokeswoman said the department took a “very broad scope” in defining violations to report to the judge, including an instance in which a detainee was released nine minutes late.
“To be sure, the Department of Justice is committed to complying with all court orders and doing so as quickly as possible, and this declaration outlines our extensive efforts to do so,” she said.
Ms. Fox is also the current co-leader of the U.S. attorney’s office in New Jersey, a role she assumed after an appellate panel ruled that Mr. Trump’s choice to lead the office was serving unlawfully. In a letter accompanying her Friday filing, Ms. Fox wrote that “we regret deeply all violations for which our office is responsible.” She assured the court that the office “takes adherence to court orders very seriously” and that “adherence to court orders is a bedrock feature of our justice system.”
Judges have repeatedly charged, however, that the administration hasn’t taken court orders seriously since the first weeks of President Trump’s second term. A recent flood of challenges to Mr. Trump’s effort to detain immigrants who entered the country illegally years ago has tested the courts’ capacity, the Justice Department’s bandwidth — and the administration’s respect for the judicial branch.
Appearing before a judge in Minnesota, one federal prosecutor working immigration cases on a temporary basis, said it sometimes took “10 emails” and a “threat that I will walk out” to persuade her clients at the Department of Homeland Security to respond to her requests to comply with court orders.
Judge Farbiarz ordered the New Jersey accounting after concluding that the Justice Department had violated one of his orders in the case of a petitioner, Baljinder Kumar, by removing him from New Jersey.
Many details of the case are sealed, but Judge Farbiarz has ordered the release of some additional filings as early as Thursday.
Ms. Fox’s recent filing wasn’t enough to fully satisfy Judge Farbiarz, who on Tuesday responded with an order praising Ms. Fox for being “careful” and thorough” but finding that the government’s compliance “falls below the relevant standards.”
“Judicial orders should never be violated,” he wrote. “And they very rarely are, especially not by government officials.” He gave the government until next Wednesday to detail what it was doing “to ensure 100 percent compliance.”
He proposed that the government commit to stop transferring any detainee who had filed a habeas petition, instead of waiting for a judge to rule. Immigrants have filed thousands of detention challenges, known as habeas corpus petitions, this year. Transferring people who have filed with the court, without a judge’s permission, is generally prohibited by federal rules.
Ms. Fox reported in her filing that most detainees transferred in violation of a judge’s order since December have now been returned to New Jersey. But in six cases, Ms. Fox’s filing gives a cursory summary of the case without specifying where the wrongly-transferred detainees are currently, or a timeline for their return. Nor does it make clear what was preventing Immigration and Customs Enforcement from promptly circulating and complying with judicial orders.
The District of New Jersey is one of 94 federal judicial districts; in the District of Minnesota the chief judge said in an order last month that he had determined that ICE had violated nearly 100 court orders since Jan. 1, a figure he said was “almost certainly substantially understated.”
Since Mr. Trump returned to office, New Jersey has emerged as a crucial hub for ICE to hold and transport detainees picked up in the Northeast, including in nearby New York City, an immigrant-rich metropolis where ICE does not have long-term detention facilities.
Most ICE detainees in New Jersey are sent to two privately-run detention facilities, in Elizabeth and Newark. The detention centers have filled up in recent months as ICE has scaled up arrests in the New York suburbs and in parts of New Jersey, including near a church in Union City over the weekend.
The detention center in Newark, a 1,000-bed compound known as Delaney Hall, has been the subject of complaints and controversy since Geo Group, one of the country’s largest private prison companies, opened it last year. In June, four men escaped from the facility following days of unrest over the living conditions inside.
While many detainees in New Jersey are held in the state as their deportation cases wind through the courts, others are transferred elsewhere as ICE moves to deport them or seeks to make space for other detainees. They are typically flown from Newark Liberty International Airport to detention centers in other states or deportation staging facilities in the South, mostly in Louisiana.
Zach Montague is a Times reporter covering the federal courts, including the legal disputes over the Trump administration’s agenda.
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