Government Lawyer in ICE Case Tells Judge: ‘This Job Sucks’

A US government attorney expressed unusual frustration in a courtroom proceeding about the difficulty in ensuring Immigration and Customs Enforcement complies with rulings ordering the release of migrants detained in the Trump administration’s Minnesota enforcement operation.

“The system sucks, this job sucks,” Julie Le, an attorney representing the US attorney’s office in Minnesota, said Tuesday in response to a federal judge’s questions on situations where courts have found ICE violated court orders in migrants’ cases, according to a person who was in the courtroom.

Le, who has been helping the US attorney’s office handle habeas petitions from migrants in Minnesota, compared pushing ICE and the Department of Homeland Security to comply as pulling teeth, and said she wished US District Judge Jerry Blackwell would hold her in contempt so she could get 24 hours of sleep, the person in the room said.

Le’s uncommon remarks come amid reports of new mass resignations of federal prosecutors in Minnesota. Justice Department lawyers have also struggled with a flood of habeas petitions related to the Trump administration’s crackdown of undocumented migrants, known as Operation Metro Surge.

The hearing Tuesday dealt with five separate habeas petitions from detained migrants, each of whom were transferred to other states as the US District Court for the District of Minnesota ordered their release. Blackwell called the hearing to determine how to move forward to ensure the administration complies with migrant release orders.

Blackwell, according to the person in the courtroom, referenced Chief US District Judge Patrick J. Schiltz’s finding last week that ICE has violated court orders almost 100 times in 74 cases brought by immigrants so far this year.

“I am trying to fix this,” Blackwell said on Tuesday, the person said.

David Wilson, an attorney for one of the migrant petitioners who wasn’t in the courtroom Tuesday, said attorneys like Le are “being put in an impossible position that no attorney would envy.”

“It is an incredible challenge to represent an agency that acts contrary to common sense and with a palpable disdain for the opinion of the judicial system,” Wilson said in an email.

Le and representatives of DOJ and DHS didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Le is listed as a DHS attorney admitted to practice in 2021 in the Minnesota Judicial Branch’s attorney database.

Her court remarks were first reported by Fox’s Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minn., affiliate.

The Trump administration has stood by its detention of migrants in Minnesota and other US cities, following a DHS policy adopted last year that noncitizens who have lived in the US for years aren’t necessarily entitled to a bond hearing. Federal courts have overwhelmingly rejected this interpretation and defended detainees’ right to bond hearings or ordered their release.

The resulting surge in habeas petitions has added to workloads in US attorney’s offices in Minneapolis and other cities targeted by the Trump administration with federal law enforcement surges.

A senior DOJ official on Monday instructed all of the 93 US attorney’s offices that they have until Feb. 6 to designate one or two assistant US attorneys who’d be available for short-term surges on a rotating basis to support districts handling alleged assaults or obstruction of law enforcement.