Surge in Immigration Cases in Minnesota Pushes Prosecutors and Judges to Brink

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Ms. Le, a prosecutor for the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota, knew that he was angry. She understood that she and her colleagues had violated his orders to release people illegally detained in the state last month. But she had already tried to quit her job, and no one would replace her, so what else could she do?

“The system sucks. This job sucks,” Ms. Le exclaimed. While she wanted to improve things, she was just one person, she explained, working around the clock to grapple with the onslaught of cases stemming from the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.

“Fixing a system, a broken system, I don’t have a magic button to do it,” she said. “I don’t have the power or the voice to do it. I only can do it within the ability and the capacity that I have.”

Ms. Le’s outburst on Tuesday at a hearing in Federal District Court in St. Paul was an extraordinary expression of personal frustration from a lawyer on the front lines of the White House’s aggressive immigration sweeps.

The remarks cost her her job at the Justice Department, where she had been working on a temporary basis to help handle habeas corpus petitions, or court filings that compel the government to justify holding someone in custody. But they also opened a window onto a broader problem: how the courts in Minnesota are buckling beneath the weight of a deluge of cases arising from the statewide campaign that the administration has called Operation Metro Surge.

The turmoil in the courts has demoralized prosecutors, outraged judges, exhausted defense lawyers — and left many immigrants languishing in detention in violation of court orders.

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When agencies like the Justice Department, the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement ignore judicial orders to release immigrants under their control, Judge Blackwell said, it is an affront not merely to personal liberty, but to the entire criminal justice system.

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The hearing was held so that Judge Blackwell could grill Ms. Le and her supervisor in the U.S. attorney’s office about why they had ignored his orders in cases in which he had determined that immigrants had been illegally detained by federal agents. While the men were all eventually released from federal custody, the judge wanted to get to the bottom of the government’s noncompliance in missing court-imposed deadlines.

Lawyers for some of the immigrants had asked him to hold the administration in contempt. And while Judge Blackwell did not immediately do so, Ms. Le, in a darkly sardonic moment, said she would not have minded if he did.

“I wish you would just hold me in contempt, Your Honor, so that I can have a full 24 hours of sleep,” she said.

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The increasingly loud warnings that the Trump administration’s immigration policies are overloading the federal judiciary extend beyond Judge Blackwell’s courtroom.

Last week, Patrick J. Schiltz, the chief federal judge in Minnesota, excoriated the administration for what he said were nearly 100 violations of court orders stemming from the Homeland Security Department’s aggressive crackdown in Minneapolis, which has led to the fatal shootings of two protesters at the hands of federal agents.

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In the Western District of Texas, Judge Leon Schydlower noted that as of last week, 134 habeas cases related to immigrants were pending in his court, and 20 to 25 new ones were arriving each week.

In West Virginia, Judge Joseph R. Goodwin used a ruling late last month ordering the release of a Venezuelan immigrant to complain about the wider problem of immigrants being held in violation of their rights.

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At the federal courthouse in St. Paul on Tuesday, Judge Blackwell started the hearing by discussing the case of an immigrant named Oscar Olvidio Tot-Choc, whom he had ordered to be freed from custody on Jan. 15. But instead of immediately complying, ICE officials flew Mr. Tot-Choc first to El Paso and then to Albuquerque.

Finally, after repeated exhortations from the judge, Ms. Le told him that Mr. Tot-Choc would return to Minnesota as a free man on Jan. 27. Not long after, however, prosecutors asked for one more day to bring him back, saying there were “safety concerns” with his flight.

Judge Blackwell blamed overreach by the Trump administration for this chaos and confusion, saying that officials had failed to put enough legal “infrastructure” in place to “keep up with it all.”

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