Judge held DOJ lawyer in contempt after ICE released habeas petitioner in Texas without ID, defying Minnesota order

On February 18, 2026, U.S. District Judge Laura Provinzino held Justice Department attorney Matthew Isihara in civil contempt of court, ordering him to pay $500 a day until the government returned identification documents to Rigoberto Soto Jimenez, a Mexican citizen and lawful permanent resident who has lived in Minnesota since 2018.

Provinzino had ordered Soto Jimenez released from ICE custody on February 9 after finding he was unlawfully detained without an administrative warrant, directing that he be released in Minnesota, where he lives, with all of his property returned. Instead, ICE released him in El Paso, Texas — a state his attorney said was "unknown to him" — without his driver's license or other identification, forcing him to spend a night in a shelter before his lawyer could arrange a flight back to Minnesota. Government attorneys told the court they had also been unable to reach the ICE officials handling the case in Texas. The exact date ICE released him in El Paso is not established in the available reporting, which places it only between the February 9 order and the February 18 contempt hearing; this entry is therefore dated to the hearing that established the defiance on the record.

Isihara and a second government attorney attributed the failure to an understaffed and overburdened office. Provinzino rejected that explanation: "The government's understaffing and high caseload is a problem of its own making and absolutely does not justify flagrant disobedience of court orders." She lifted the contempt finding one day later, on February 19, after the documents were returned, but ordered government lawyers to immediately notify the court of any future risk of noncompliance.

Updates

2026-04-20 — DOJ appealed contempt order to Eighth Circuit, calling it "manifestly improper" [2][3]

The Department of Justice appealed Judge Provinzino's contempt finding to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit; the court declined a motion to dismiss the appeal on April 20, 2026, allowing it to proceed. In a June 26, 2026 reply brief, DOJ argued the sanction was "manifestly improper" and that a court cannot impose personal-capacity contempt fines on a government attorney "out of frustration with his client agency's conduct," adding that Isihara lacked adequate notice he might face personal contempt. A court-appointed amicus countered that DOJ should lose the appeal outright, since the fine was purged after one day, making it moot. The appeal remained pending as of this update.