Trump admin attorney leaves Minnesota after telling judge her job ‘sucks’ amid crush of immigration cases

By Devan Cole, Tierney Sneed, Hannah Rabinowitz, CNN

(CNN) — An Immigration and Customs Enforcement attorney detailed to Minnesota to help handle the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in the Twin Cities has been removed from her post after telling a judge that the job “sucks” because of the crushing workload and the government’s apparent inability to comply with court orders.

The attorney, Julie Le, was sent back to her job at ICE, according to a source familiar with the matter.

In an extraordinarily candid exchange with a federal judge on Tuesday, Le, who had been asked to explain why the administration was not promptly complying with a slew of court orders stemming from immigration cases she’s handling, admitted that the government did not have enough lawyers on the ground to adequately keep up with Operation Metro Surge and that trying to get errors fixed is like “pulling teeth.”

“They are overwhelmed and they need help, so I, I have to say, stupidly (volunteered),” she told US District Judge Jerry Blackwell, according to a transcript of the hearing obtained by CNN. Blackwell is threatening to hold her and another lawyer in contempt for repeated violations of orders he’s issued in immigration cases.

“Sometime I wish you would just hold me in contempt, your honor, so that I can have a full 24 hours of sleep. I work days and night just because people (are) still in there,” Le said.

“And, yes, procedure in place right now sucks. I’m trying to fix it,” she continued. “I am here with you, your honor. What do you want me to do? The system sucks. This job sucks. And I am trying every breath that I have so that I can get you what you need.”

CNN has reached out to Le.

Her comments in court offer a rare look under the hood of Operation Metro Surge, which officials announced Wednesday would be partially scaled back. Le and the other administration lawyers working on immigration cases in Minnesota since the crackdown began have been facing intense scrutiny from the judges there over a slew of missteps in the cases.

Last week, the chief judge of the state’s federal trial-level court said ICE “has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence” and specifically called out nearly 100 court orders he said had been violated in recent weeks.

Among those orders are ones requiring the government to immediately release immigrant detainees whom judges determined were being held unlawfully in Minnesota or Texas, where many of them were flown after being arrested in the Twin Cities. Judges, including Blackwell, were also frustrated by release conditions ICE had imposed on some immigrants since the court had not specifically allowed the agency to fashion such conditions.

“It takes 10 e-mails to get a release condition to be corrected,” Le told Judge Blackwell on Tuesday. “It take(s) two escalation(s) and a threat that I will walk out for that to be corrected.”

Though Blackwell said he thought Le and Justice Department attorney Ana Voss, who is also facing a contempt threat, were “working in good faith and under difficult circumstances,” he warned them that “a court order is not advisory and it is not conditional.”

“It is not something that any agency can treat as optional while it decides how or whether to comply with the court order,” the judge said.

“Having what you feel are too many detainees, too many cases, too many deadlines, and not enough infrastructure to keep up with it all, is not a defense to continued detention. If anything, it ought to be a warning sign,” Blackwell added.

A ‘detain first, find authority later’ approach

Tuesday’s hearing was called after Blackwell grew increasingly distressed about repeated violations of court orders in a handful of cases in which he determined that an immigrant swept up in Operation Metro Surge had been unlawfully detained by the administration.

In one such case, a man who was detained by ICE officers on January 10 was ordered released by Blackwell five days later, after the judge concluded that his criminal history did not warrant mandatory immigration custody.

The government failed to provide an update on the immigrant’s status two days later, as Blackwell had required, and subsequent follow-ups by the court for that information yielded nothing fruitful.

In the end, the man, referred to in court papers as “Oscar,” was flown back to Minnesota nearly two weeks after he was initially ordered released, and Blackwell said the government had provided no good explanation for the lengthy delay in his case.

“Detention without lawful authority is not just a technical defect, it is a constitutional injury that unfairly falls on the heads of those who have done nothing wrong to justify it,” he said during the hearing.

Oscar’s attorney, Kira Kelley, told Blackwell that the administration’s “detain first, find authority later” approach to immigration enforcement had resulted in a “horrific experience” for her client, who she said went without clean food and clean clothes during the ordeal.

“Just the conditions of his confinement; eating food that he conflated with dog food. That people are just being treated like less than human. And all of this was happening while he had a court order for his release,” Kelley said.

‘I also go back and threaten them’

The Trump administration’s enforcement blitz in Minnesota has faced push back from state and local officials, who failed to convince a different federal judge in Minneapolis to temporarily block the operation. It has also sparked extensive protests and last month two US citizens were shot by federal law enforcement agents.

But Le, too, appeared to have some reservations about how the operation was being handled and the way in which her colleagues were responding to adverse court orders stemming from it.

She said at one point that “it took a fight, a big, huge fight,” to get colleagues at ICE to walk back release conditions improperly imposed by the agency on some immigrants who were ordered released by judges in Minnesota.

Her warning to them, she said, was that if they didn’t work to clean up the problems, she would put their names on court filings to ensure she wasn’t the only person taking heat over the issues.

“That’s not just you threaten me, Your Honor, I always – I also go back and threaten them,” she said.

In another unusual admission from Le, the attorney said the chaos of the assignment had led her to submit her resignation, but that she stopped short of leaving the temporary post because she felt she was needed to ensure people were not continuing to remain detained even after a judge said they needed to be released.

“Like, Wait, Julie, stop. You need to go back and get more people out. That’s why I’m still here,” she told the judge. “I am here just trying to make sure that the agency understand how important it is to comply with all the court orders, which they have not done in the past or currently.”

Blackwell did not rule from the bench what action he would take in response to the repeated violations.

This story has been updated with additional details.

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