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Amid the uproar over President Donald Trump’s assault on Minnesota’s immigrant communities, another abuse has drawn less attention: a brazen disregard for judicial limits on his deportation campaign. The courts have determined that in January alone the administration violated at least 96 orders in 74 cases challenging the unlawful detention of immigrants in Minneapolis. The Justice Department has failed to meet its most basic obligations in many of these cases, due to an apparent combination of malice, incompetence, and institutional depletion. Further evidence of its unraveling came on Tuesday, when Julie Le, a government attorney, told Judge Jerry Blackwell, in open court: “I wish you would just hold me in contempt, Your Honor, so that I can have a full 24 hours of sleep.” Of the backlog in Minneapolis, Le then told Blackwell: “What do you want me to do? The system sucks. This job sucks. And I am trying every breath that I have so that I can get you what you need.”
On this week’s Slate Plus bonus episode of Amicus, co-hosts Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern discussed Le’s shocking courtroom breakdown and what it reveals about the DOJ’s broader meltdown under Trump’s impossible demands. A preview of their conversation, below, has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Dahlia Lithwick: Is this the clearest sign yet that for all of its tough talk about going to “war” with “rogue judges,” the DOJ under Trump is in full-on dumpster-fire crisis mode?
Mark Joseph Stern: It’s a sign that the Justice Department is actively collapsing. And it’s important to understand the background here. Blackwell had ordered Le to explain why the government failed to comply with his order demanding the release of a detained immigrant, as well as why she shouldn’t be personally held in contempt for defying that order. Her response was that she had been given an impossible task. It turned out that the Trump administration had assigned her to the U.S. attorney’s office to handle 88 immigration cases in under a month, a crushing load. That overwhelming surge of immigration cases is happening all over the country, but it’s especially acute in Minneapolis because of the ongoing crackdown on immigrant communities there.
But this is a problem entirely of the administration’s own making. Back in July, the government unilaterally reinterpreted federal immigration law to require the detention of any immigrant who was never legally admitted into the country, rather than allowing them to be released and given a bond hearing. So even if they have lawful presence today, they must be detained indefinitely. As our friend Chris Geidner explained at Law Dork, courts have overwhelmingly rejected that reinterpretation: More than 350 decisions by 160 different judges in about 50 different courts have all found that that interpretation is obviously wrong. But because the Supreme Court took away universal injunctions in the birthright citizenship case in its most recent term, no single court can block the government from enforcing this position nationwide, so it keeps trying, over and over again.
That means the government is illegally detaining thousands of immigrants based on an egregious misreading of the law. Those immigrants are flooding the courts with habeas petitions for release. There were 581 habeas cases in Minnesota in January alone—an exponential increase of unmanageable proportions. The courts are overwhelmingly granting these petitions, but then the immigrants are not being released, because the DOJ doesn’t have enough lawyers on hand to process all of the rulings and ensure that Immigration and Customs Enforcement is actually releasing people. So that is the background that led this attorney, Le, to have a breakdown in court and say: I am unable to do the job that has been asked of me.
I want to flag that this isn’t a factual dispute. It’s not a legal dispute. It’s not a pound-on-the-table dispute. It’s a decision by the Justice Department to not have enough lawyers, and to make the system collapse under the weight of indifference and apathy. Since Trump’s second inauguration, you and I have talked a lot about judges who are mad, frustrated, and venting at Trump lawyers. This is something different. It’s scaled up massively. This is an admonition from a judge saying that the entire system of justice cannot be sustained this way, and he is watching it veer off the rails.
You see that in something else Blackwell said on Tuesday: “Having what you feel are too many detainees, too many cases, too many deadlines, and not enough infrastructure to keep up with it all is not a defense to continued detention. If anything, it ought to be a warning sign.” He’s saying the government cannot create a crisis by detaining way too many immigrants illegally, then claim that it is too overwhelmed to comply with orders releasing those immigrants. That is such a vital point for a judge to make when we know that the Trump administration’s strategy is always Flood the zone. Shock and awe. Inundate the opposition with an endless blitz. And in a very real sense here, the opposition is the judiciary. It’s judges like Blackwell who are willing to stand up and say: This is illegal. You are not allowed to do this.
This is the same DOJ that’s out there on X, advertising for lawyers. Chad Mizelle, former DOJ chief of staff, literally tweeted last month: “If you are a lawyer, are interested in being an AUSA, and support President Trump and anti-crime agenda, DM me.” This isn’t freaking Dairy Queen! But one way to destroy an institution from within is to create a crisis, right? They created a crisis with the immigration sweeps. Then they created a double crisis by saying, “Well, Justice Department lawyers just can’t handle all the work.” It’s a way of signaling that the whole institution is broken.
And that’s the point. If it’s understood that DOJ lawyers suck and there’s nothing a judge can do to enforce his will, the takeaway for the public is: I guess the justice system doesn’t matter. I guess the Constitution doesn’t matter. So Julie Le freaking out in open court doesn’t get us where we need to go. We need to take the next step, which is to say that they are breaking systems and exulting in it. And that’s the part that we are not reckoning with.
I agree. These assistant U.S. attorney positions used to be super prestigious and competitive. They were a launchpad to an elite career in the law. Now Trump officials are basically pleading with people to apply for them by DM on Elon Musk’s Nazi-hangout site. There has been a mass exodus from the Justice Department—thousands of attorneys have fled since Trump returned to office. And of course the White House has purged almost every lawyer who worked on Jan. 6 cases on top of that. And now the administration can’t fill these positions. But this was the inevitable consequence of Trump’s abolishing the traditional independence of the DOJ. The department now works directly for him, including the prosecution of his political adversaries.
On top of that, the attorneys who remain in their positions have to defend these unlawful detentions, racist arrests, and other unconstitutional behavior. They’re being pulled off actual criminal cases to prosecute immigrants instead. Real violent crimes are going unprosecuted so that the deportation machine can be fed. It would take an army of immigration lawyers to handle all of this work that the DOJ has now created for itself. And nobody with a conscience wants to do this stuff. I want to quote another thing Le said in the courtroom, after Blackwell asked her about the government snatching people up in Minnesota, flying them to a detention center across the country, then not bringing them back for hearings. Le said: “I share the same concern with you, Your Honor. I am not white, as you can see, and my family’s at risk as any other people that might get picked up too. So I share the same concern, and I took that concern to heart.”
Here is a lawyer saying: Wait, what am I doing here? Why am I defending these racist policies? I shouldn’t be here either. My own family is at risk because of the policies that I’m defending. When that kind of breakdown of the system is happening in open court, of course there aren’t enough lawyers to do all of this work, because only the most racist, nativist freaks will remain. And there aren’t enough good lawyers who are also racist freaks to carry all of the weight that the DOJ is putting on itself.
To that end, we should note that Le has reportedly been removed from her post. But I think that the point we’re both trying to make is that we learned this lesson from Elon Musk, right? The easiest way to decimate government functioning is to decimate government itself. And so this is an act of contempt, but it’s also an act of power. It’s saying: You can’t make me, and I don’t care.
