Judge Blackwell found ICE, DHS and DOJ routinely defied orders releasing Minnesota detainees; DOJ ended the testifying attorney's detail

On February 3, 2026, at a hearing in federal court in St. Paul, Minnesota, U.S. District Judge Jerry Blackwell found that the government had routinely failed to comply with his orders releasing immigration detainees, and told the lawyer appearing for it that the volume of cases was no defense. "A court order is not advisory, and it is not conditional," Blackwell said, according to the transcript. "It is not something that any agency can treat as optional while it decides how or whether to comply with the court order." He described people being held for days or even weeks after judges had ordered their release, detainees moved to facilities in El Paso and New Mexico despite release orders, and release conditions such as ankle monitors imposed on people the court had never authorized conditions for. "The overwhelming majority of the hundreds seen by this court have been found to be lawfully present as of now in the country," he said, adding that "the DOJ, the DHS, and ICE are not above the law."

The hearing arose out of Operation Metro Surge, the roughly 3,000-agent immigration enforcement deployment to the Twin Cities that began in December 2025 and generated hundreds of habeas corpus petitions in the District of Minnesota. Special Assistant U.S. Attorney Julie Le, a Department of Homeland Security attorney detailed into the U.S. Attorney's Office from ICE's immigration courts, had been assigned 91 immigration cases in under a month — 88 in Minnesota and three in Texas — and was questioned about noncompliance in five of the cases she was handling. Le testified that she had received no orientation or training for the assignment, that it took "10 e-mails," two escalations and a threat to walk out to get a single release condition corrected, and that getting ICE to respond to judicial orders was like "pulling teeth." "What do you want me to do? The system sucks. This job sucks," she told Blackwell, adding that she sometimes wished he would hold her in contempt "so that I can have a full 24 hours of sleep," and that she did not have "the power or the voice" to fix a broken system. Blackwell, who was weighing contempt against Le and against Ana Voss, the civil chief of the Minnesota U.S. Attorney's Office, said he believed both were working in good faith under difficult circumstances.

The U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Minnesota ended Le's detail the next day and returned her to her ICE post. DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement that Le was a probationary attorney and that "this conduct is unprofessional and unbecoming of an ICE attorney in abandoning her obligation to act with commitment, dedication, and zeal to the interests of the United States Government." Voss left the office by February 9. This entry is dated to the February 3 hearing because that is when the pattern of noncompliance was established on the record; the individual failures Blackwell described accumulated across the preceding weeks and no single date can be assigned to them.

Updates

2026-02-26 — Chief judge threatened criminal contempt over 200-plus violated orders [5][6]

Chief U.S. District Judge Patrick Schiltz filed an order threatening the use of criminal contempt against ICE, writing that "the court is not aware of another occasion in the history of the United States in which a federal court has had to threaten contempt — again and again and again — to force the United States government to comply with court orders," and concluding: "One way or another, ICE will comply with this Court's orders." Schiltz had attached to a January 28 order a list of 96 violated court orders in 74 cases; on February 26 he added 113 further violations, bringing the documented total past 200. The same day, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Bryan set a formal contempt hearing for U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen and ICE officials over the government's failure to return detainees' property, calling the government's responses "incomplete and evasive." Rosen had disputed the accuracy of the judges' list; Schiltz responded that what the office's attorneys "didn't deserve" was "the Administration sending 3,000 ICE agents to Minnesota to detain people without making any provision for handling the hundreds of lawsuits."