A government lawyer begged a federal judge to hold her in contempt of court so she could spend 24 hours behind bars and finally get some sleep, rather than deal with the tsunami of legal work President Trump’s immigration enforcement surge has spawned.
Julie Le, who is helping the Justice Department defend cases in federal court in Minnesota, had a stinging criticism of the way things are playing out, with hundreds of challenges filed last month to Homeland Security’s immigration arrests in Minnesota.
“The system sucks, this job sucks,” Ms. Le said, according to Fox 9 in Minneapolis.
She asked to be held in contempt “so I can get 24 hours of sleep.”
Ms. Le was arguing before U.S. District Judge Jerry Blackwell, one of a number of judges in Minnesota who are handling the hundreds of “habeas corpus” cases that have been filed demanding U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement release detained migrants.
The chief federal judge in Minnesota last month said ICE had defied 96 federal court orders in 74 different cases. Those orders were usually writs of habeas corpus ordering migrants released.
Judge Patrick Schiltz, a George W. Bush appointee, said the problem didn’t appear to be the Justice Department, which was struggling to handle the caseload, but rather ICE, which wasn’t moving quickly enough to comply.
Ms. Le said she was trying to get ICE to comply.
“I am here to make sure the agency understands how important it is to comply with court orders,” she said, according to Fox 9.
Her complaints about the surge of litigation were stark, but they are from from unique as the Trump administration moved aggressively to enforce immigration laws, and is now seeing unprecedented pushback from judges who say the push has gone too far.
The administration last year reinterpreted a law to argue that DHS has the ability to detain illegal immigrants arrested out in the community even if ICE didn’t first have a warrant or a deportation order secured.
That change has produced thousands of habeas challenges across the country and judges have almost universally ruled against the Trump position.
