street. PAUL, MINNESOTA — Minnesota’s top federal judge issued a stern warning Thursday to the state’s federal prosecutor, as well as to Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, warning them that they must comply with court orders or risk criminal contempt of court charges.
Chief Justice Patrick Schiltz, who was appointed to the bench by President George W. Bush He is seen as conservative, He took issue with an email he received on February 9 from US Attorney Daniel Rosen, in which the prosecutor accused the judge of overstating the extent of ICE’s non-compliance with court orders arising from the Trump administration’s actions. Immigration enforcement campaign In Minnesota.
His order Thursday was the latest in a series of critical and momentous decisions Stinging sometimes Statements and rulings by federal judges in Minnesota and elsewhere across the country against how the Trump administration has attempted to conduct mass deportations of immigrants, often citing violations of due process and standards of humane treatment.
In a motion filed Thursday by another judge, Rosen, the head of his civil division and ICE representatives, were ordered to appear at a hearing Tuesday for failing to comply with court orders on the return of detainees’ property.
Schiltz had previously described ICE as a serial violator of court orders related to Increase enforcement. In a Jan. 28 order, he expressed “serious concerns” after federal judges in Minnesota identified 96 orders that ICE violated in 74 cases. In Thursday’s order, Schiltz said the government’s response “was not to do a better job of complying with the court’s orders, but to attack the court instead.”
Rosen told Schiltz that his office’s review of a “statistically robust sample” of 12 of those 74 cases found a high compliance rate, and complained that the judges’ tally “was way beyond accurate for something that can be so openly and aggressively enforced. And the attorneys in my civil division didn’t deserve that.”
Schiltz wrote in a new order he filed Thursday that he then asked his judges and law clerks to review the numbers. While he said they discovered some errors, which cut both ways, they concluded that ICE violated 97 orders in 66 of the cases cited in his previous order.
“Increasingly, this court has had to resort to using the threat of civil contempt to compel ICE to comply with orders,” he wrote. “The Court is not aware of another incident in the history of the United States in which a federal court has had to threaten contempt of court — repeatedly — to compel the United States government to comply with court orders.”
The Chief Justice also attached a list documenting 113 additional violations of orders in 77 additional cases, most of them since the original census.
“This district’s judges have been extraordinarily patient with government lawyers, realizing that they have been placed in an impossible position by Rosen and his superiors at the Department of Justice,” Schiltz wrote, noting that Wave of resignations This has He left Rosen’s office in brief. “What these lawyers did not deserve was that the administration sent 3,000 ICE agents to Minnesota to detain people without taking any action to deal with the hundreds of lawsuits that were sure to follow.”
Neither Rosen nor ICE officials immediately responded to a request for comment.
Rosen acknowledged in a news conference on Wednesday — his first since taking office in October — that his staff of prosecutors It has decreased significantly. He bristled when it was pointed out that there were at least two Criminal cases were dropped In recent days partly due to losses. Rosen said the office had 64 assistant U.S. attorneys on the last day of his predecessor’s term. 47 as of Rosen’s first day. It’s now down to 36. But he also insisted he was appointing new prosecutors at a “good clip” and that his office still had the capacity to prosecute major crimes.
The Chief Justice ended with a blunt warning:
“This court will continue to do whatever is needed to protect the rule of law, including, if necessary, moving to the use of criminal contempt,” he wrote. “One way or another, ICE will comply with this court’s orders.”