Federal judge threatens ICE chief with contempt, orders court appearance

Minnesota’s chief federal judge has demanded the acting head of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement personally appear in court Friday, threatening to hold him in contempt for what the judge described as repeated defiance of court orders amid the agency’s enforcement efforts in the state.

“The court’s patience is at an end,” U.S. District Judge Patrick J. Schiltz wrote in a remarkable filing late Monday, summoning acting ICE director Todd M. Lyons to his courtroom. Schiltz cited several instances in which ICE failed to grant detained immigrants bond hearings that had been ordered by the courts.

The order amounted to an extraordinary public cry of frustration from a federal judiciary that has been inundated with pleas from detained migrants and government attempts to charge protesters since the Trump administration began surging thousands of agents to Minnesota in recent weeks as part of its biggest immigration crackdown to date.

It also threatened to set up a another showdown between the federal courts and Trump administration officials, who have sought to paint judges who question their tactics as “liberal activists” and have in some instances called for their impeachments.

“The Court acknowledges that ordering the head of a federal agency to personally appear is an extraordinary step,” wrote Schiltz, an appointee of President George W. Bush and a former law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. “But the extent of ICE’s violation of court orders is likewise extraordinary, and lesser measures have been tried and failed.”

It was not clear Tuesday whether Lyons would comply with the order to appear or whether Justice Department attorneys would seek to block it in court. A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Schiltz’s summons arose out of a case involving a Ecuadorian man who remains in ICE custody despite the judge ordering his release more than two weeks ago. The judge said he would cancel Friday’s hearing – and the summons of Lyons – if the agency could prove before then that the detained migrant has been released.

Since the start of the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement effort in Minnesota, dubbed Operation Metro Surge, the state’s seven full-time U.S. district judges and a stable of semiretired colleagues have struggled to manage a sharply increased caseload.

Court dockets have swelled with hundreds of cases involving immigrants seeking release from ICE detention. This month alone, federal judges in Minnesota have fielded more than 280 requests, according to a Washington Post analysis of court dockets in the state. Those figures mark a steep rise from previous months, when number of such filings rarely reached 10 per month.

“It’s put a tremendous burden on our court staff and on lawyers,” U.S. District Judge Eric Tostrud, a Trump appointee, said at a court hearing Monday. “They’ve been asked to respond or prepare filings on remarkably short timetables. Our court staff has essentially been working around-the-clock.”

The escalation in filings has come as the courts have also been tasked with hearing broader cases, grappling with thorny legal questions about the legality of the surge and the investigation of the fatal shooting over the weekend of Minnesota resident Alex Pretti by the U.S. Border Patrol.

“I think it kind of goes without saying that we are in shockingly unusual times,” U.S. District Judge Katherine Menendez said Monday as she kicked off a hearing on a request from Minnesota authorities to curtail ICE’s operations in the state.

Just days earlier, Menendez, who was appointed to the bench by President Joe Biden, had issued an order in a separate case barring federal agents deployed as part of the surge from detaining or using tear gas against peaceful protesters. (That decision has been stayed by an appeals court.)

Amid the flood of cases, Schiltz and the district’s other judges have repeatedly expressed exasperation – through a series of increasingly sharply worded rulings – over what they have described as the administration’s failure to comply with their orders in immigration cases and “unprecedented” conduct by prosecutors pushing to charge demonstrators protesting ICE’s operations in the state.

“There has been an undeniable move by the Government in the past month to defy court orders or at least to stretch the legal process to the breaking point in an attempt to deny noncitizens their due process rights,” Senior U.S. District Judge Michael Davis, an appointee of President Bill Clinton, wrote Sunday in a ruling ordering the release of a migrant detained this month.

In other instances Schiltz cited in his order Monday, some immigrants who had been granted bond hearings by the courts had seen their detentions extended instead or had been flown to Texas despite orders that ICE keep them in the state.

Schiltz said that the court had been “extremely patient” with the government, “even though [it] decided to send thousands of agents to Minnesota to detain aliens without making any provision for dealing with the hundreds of habeas petitions and other lawsuits that were sure to result.”

His ruling Monday came days after he vented his frustrations with the federal surge in a remarkable missive sent to the St. Louis-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit, which oversees matters arising from Minnesota and six other states.

“I am also dealing with a number of emergencies, including a lockdown at the Minneapolis courthouse because of protest activity, the defiance of several court orders by ICE, and the illegal detention of many detainees by ICE (including, yesterday, a two-year-old),” Schiltz wrote to the appeals court Saturday.

That letter came in response to a series of highly unusual moves undertaken by the Justice Department last week in its push to charge anti-ICE demonstrators who interrupted a Jan. 18 church service in St. Paul.

Prosecutors have charged three protesters with conspiring to violate the congregants’ constitutionally protected rights to religious expression. But a U.S. magistrate judge refused to sign arrest warrants for another five other people present during the protest, including former CNN anchor Don Lemon and one of his producers, citing a lack of probable cause.

Justice Department lawyers rushed to push Schiltz to overturn that decision, and when he refused, raced to the 8th Circuit, describing the case as a “national security emergency.”

The appeals court rejected the government’s request to intervene, and the Justice Department has since dropped its efforts to overturn the magistrate judge’s decision.

But before those moves, Schiltz described the Justice Department’s conduct in the case as “unprecedented” in his series of letters to the appellate court.

“The worst behavior alleged about any of them is yelling horrible things at the members of the church. None committed any acts of violence,” he wrote.

He said he had surveyed judges in Minnesota and in other courts in the 8th Circuit’s jurisdiction, none of whom could remember such aggressive tactics by prosecutors when required by judges to bolster a criminal case.

“The reason this never happens is likely that, if the government does not like the magistrate judge’s decision, it can either improve the affidavit and present it again to the same magistrate judge or it can present its case to a grand jury and seek an indictment,” Schiltz wrote.

Of Lemon and his producer, Schiltz added in a separate letter: “There is no evidence that those two engaged in any criminal behavior or conspired to do so.”

Though much of the judge’s correspondence to the appeals court was focused on the details of the protesters’ case, his letter Friday also offered a rare glimpse of the personal strain the administration’s surge was placing on judges left to deal with it.

Schiltz noted that the Justice Departments demands for immediate action had come while he was working from home and caring for his adult son, who is mentally disabled. Meanwhile, immigration raids continued to roil his city, protests abounded, and within hours of his note, Pretti would be fatally shot.

Amy Sweasy, a University of Minnesota law professor, praised Schiltz and the other federal judges in Minnesota for their efforts to handle the increased caseload and serve fairly as independent arbiters of the law. But, she added, it is impossible for them to do that completely divorced from what is occurring outside their courtrooms.

“They’re members of this community,” she said. “They live here, and they’re experiencing it, too.”