ST. PAUL — U.S. District Court Chief Judge Patrick Schiltz said the federal judiciary is prepared to hold Trump administration officials in criminal contempt, which could include jail time, for continuing to violate court orders as they seek mass deportations.
Schiltz’s order filed on Thursday ratchets up the pressure on U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the U.S. Department of Justice to comply with orders from Minnesota’s increasingly impatient and irate federal judges, who have repeatedly threatened government officials with civil contempt for flouting their orders regarding illegally detained immigrants.
“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,” wrote Schiltz, a George W. Bush appointee and one-time clerk for the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, a conservative icon.
“This Court will continue to do whatever is required to protect the rule of law, including, if necessary, moving to the use of criminal contempt. One way or another, ICE will comply with this Court’s orders.”
The order was filed in a case regarding an Ecuadorian man who came to the United States as a minor in 1999 and was detained by immigration agents in early January. The government failed to meet court deadlines to respond and did not release the man until Schiltz ordered Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons to appear in court and explain why the government should not be held in contempt for violating court orders.
The man was released before the contempt hearing and Schiltz canceled it in an order filed Jan. 28 that still sharply rebuked the federal government for not complying with so many orders. The order included a list of 74 cases in which 96 court orders were violated, though with the caveat that it may contain mistakes because it was “hurriedly compiled by extraordinarily busy judges.”
U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen responded by accusing the judges of wildly overstating how many orders were violated based on what he called a “statistically strong sample” of the first dozen cases listed.
“Assuming the statistical sample we chose is as representative of the whole as I believe it likely is, the information compiled by others for your order was far beyond the pale of accuracy for an order that would be wielded so publicly and so sharply,” Rosen wrote. “The lawyers in my civil division didn’t deserve it.”
The U.S. Attorney’s Office has seen a wave of departures of career prosecutors during Operation Metro Surge, some who have reportedly quit in protest over the Department of Justice’s handling of investigations into the killing of two Americans in Minneapolis by federal immigration agents during Operation Metro Surge.
Federal judges have excoriated the Trump administration for directing immigration agents to carry out mass arrests and detention of immigrants without warrants under a new legal theory that contradicts decades of precedent.
Judges have ruled again and again — in hundreds of cases in Minnesota alone — against that interpretation that immigrants can be detained indefinitely during immigration proceedings no matter how long they’ve been in the country.
“What those attorneys ‘didn’t deserve,’” Schiltz wrote in response to Rosen, “was the Administration sending 3,000 ICE agents to Minnesota to detain people without making any provision for handling the hundreds of lawsuits that were sure to follow.”
Schiltz also asked each judge to revisit the cases in which orders were violated and then had court clerks check its accuracy. The court found some mistakes in their original list, but the mistakes “cut both ways.”
The court determined the federal government had violated 97 orders in 66 of the cases listed in the Jan. 28 order. What is more, judges tallied 113 additional court order violations in 77 cases since then.
“If anything is ‘beyond the pale,’ it is ICE’s continued violation of the orders of this court,” Schiltz wrote.
Schiltz’s order came the same day U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Bryan ordered Rosen to appear before him in court on March 3 along with ICE officials to “show cause” for why federal officials should not be held in contempt for not returning the property of immigrants deemed to have been illegally detained in 28 cases.
On Monday, U.S. District Judge Eric Tostrud held the Trump administration in civil contempt for releasing a man in Texas without his belongings after a court ordered he not be transferred out of Minnesota, where he was arrested. Tostrud ordered the U.S. government to pay $568.29, the cost of his plane ticket back to Minnesota.
Last week, U.S. District Judge Laura Provinzino held Special Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew Isihara in civil contempt, imposing a $500 fine for each day the government did not return the identification documents of an immigrant arrested in Minnesota but released in Texas. The government swiftly returned the man’s documents and no fines were imposed on the attorney.
Minnesota Reformer is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Minnesota Reformer maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor J. Patrick Coolican for questions: info@minnesotareformer.com.
