Two federal judges rebuke Minnesota U.S. Attorney after ICE fails to follow court orders
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A federal judge in St. Paul on Thursday ordered Minnesota's top federal law enforcement official to appear in court and explain why immigration authorities failed to return the belongings of more than two dozen people they arrested and detained illegally.
The order from U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Bryan comes on the same day that Chief Judge Patrick Schiltz sharply rebuked U.S. Attorney Dan Rosen over the way his office has responded to petitions from migrants who’ve filed petitions of habeas corpus alleging unlawful detention.
Rosen did not immediately reply to a request for comment from MPR News.
Bryan, a 2023 appointee of President Joe Biden, writes that government officials have not complied with multiple court orders requiring them to return cash, phones, passports, identification documents, work permits and other personal property of people freed from immigration detention. Bryan noted that all 27 petitioners listed in his Thursday order “had been unlawfully detained.”
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Writing separately, Schiltz, who served as a clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in the 1980s before being appointed to the bench in 2005 by President George W. Bush, said that Rosen not only failed to improve his office’s compliance with previous court orders but chose “instead to attack the court.”
In January, Schiltz ordered Acting Director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Todd Lyons to appear in his Minneapolis courtroom after ICE failed to free Juan Hugo Tobay Robles, an Ecuadorian man who came to the U.S. as a teen. “[T]he Court’s patience is at an end,” Schiltz wrote before canceling the hearing when ICE freed Tobay Robles.
In his Jan. 28 order and an attached appendix, Schiltz listed 96 previous court orders that ICE had violated in 74 habeas cases.
In his follow-up order Thursday, Schiltz points to a Feb. 9 letter from Rosen in which the U.S. attorney “accused the Court of wildly overstating the extent of ICE’s noncompliance with orders. Specifically, Rosen said that he had asked a lawyer in his office to review ‘a statistically strong sample of the 75 cases’ listed in the appendix to the Court’s Jan. 28 order. That ‘statistically strong sample’ consisted of the first 12 cases on the list.”
Rosen added that “the information compiled by others for your order was far beyond the pale of accuracy for an order that would be wielded so publicly and so sharply. The lawyers in my civil division didn’t deserve it.”
“Because Rosen made serious allegations” against Schiltz and other federal judges, Schiltz asked his colleagues to revisit the list of cases in which the government violated court orders.
While acknowledging some mistakes “that cut both ways,” Schiltz determined that “ICE violated 97 orders in 66 of the cases.”
After reviewing more habeas petitions, Schiltz writes that court staff turned up 113 more orders that ICE has violated in 77 additional cases.
“What those attorneys ‘didn’t deserve,’” Schiltz adds, “was the Administration sending 3,000 ICE agents to Minnesota to detain people without making any provision for handling the hundreds of lawsuits that were sure to follow.”
“One way or another, ICE will comply with this Court’s orders,” Schiltz concludes.
ICE keeps detainees’ belongings
In response to a separate batch of habeas petitions, Judge Bryan on Feb. 20 ordered the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, to “immediately return all property in their possession,” and he later threatened federal authorities with contempt of court if they didn’t comply.
In his Thursday order, Bryan said DHS has yet to comply and that he can’t ignore their “unlawful conduct.” Bryan writes that Rosen and Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office Acting Civil Chief David Fuller must appear in court and show why they shouldn't be held in civil or criminal contempt.
The judge also ordered unnamed representatives of ICE to appear at the Tuesday morning hearing at the St. Paul federal courthouse. Bryan added that he will consider canceling the contempt hearing if the parties show that the government has returned all of the former detainees’ property.
Number of filings overwhelms court personnel
More than a thousand immigrants in Minnesota have filed habeas corpus petitions challenging their detentions since “Operation Metro Surge” began in December. The deluge of civil cases has overwhelmed the federal courts and the U.S. Attorney’s Office, which is defending the government.
On Feb. 18, U.S. District Judge Laura Provinzino found Special Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew Isihara to be primarily responsible for DHS’s failure to return the belongings of Rigoberto Soto Jimenez, a citizen of Mexico who lives in Big Lake, Minn., and was arrested in January.
At the hearing, Isihara, a U.S. Army attorney on special assignment to Minnesota, apologized and said he has an enormous caseload.
“I've had anywhere between 126 and 129 [habeas corpus] cases assigned in the last month,” Isihara said. “It's been a very large volume, and it's sort of overwhelmed any — I think — any individual attorney's ability to keep up with.”
Provinzino held Isihara in contempt of court and threatened to fine him $500 for each day that Soto Jiminez’s belongings remained with DHS. She lifted the order the next day after DHS confirmed that it returned the items to Soto Jimenez. Though Isihara is no longer facing sanctions, he is appealing Provinzino’s contempt finding.
Following more than a dozen departures of senior staff, the Justice Department has sent assistant U.S. attorneys from other districts as well as the military to handle the increasing caseload.
In early February, Judge Jerry Blackwell also called government attorneys into court to explain why they hadn’t complied with court orders. At the hearing, then-Special Assistant U.S. Attorney Julie Le told Blackwell that many ICE and DHS leaders did not understand the gravity of judicial orders and expressed exasperation with the demands of her work.
“The system sucks. This job sucks,” Le told Blackwell. “I wish you would hold me in contempt so I would have a full 24 hours’ sleep.”
Le soon left her assignment with the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
On Monday, Judge Eric Tostrud found the government in contempt for transferring a man to a detention facility in Texas against the court’s orders and leaving him stranded when he was released. DHS was forced to pay for the man’s airfare to Minnesota.
Other judges express frustration
Federal judges in other states have also pushed back against federal authorities, including in New Jersey, where officials in President Donald Trump’s administration admitted to violating more than 50 orders in the state.
In an order Thursday, U.S. District Judge Zahid N. Quraishi , who’s based in Trenton, N.J., said that while the government’s procedures for “immigration arrest and detention may have had the initial appearance of negligence, they have since slid downward into manifest recklessness.”
Quraishi said he’s willing to bring federal officials before his court if they don’t comply with his order and free a 29-year-old Salvadoran man from immigration detention.
