DOJ Lawyer Who Melted Down In Court Offered Terrifying Peek Into ‘Broken System’

Things are so chaotic under the dystopian circus tent that is the Trump administration’s mass deportation operation that even lawyers hired to enforce his policies apparently can’t figure out how to make the clown music stop.

This week, the chaos spilled out of the car in Minnesota when Julie Le, a onetime ICE attorney who had volunteered with the Justice Department to handle cases for Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis, went viral for telling a federal judge, in an official court hearing, that “this job sucks” and admitting that she welcomed the idea of being held in contempt just so she could get a “full 24 hours sleep.”

Le, who was listed in nearly 90 cases, has reportedly been removed from her role since her outburst. But a court transcript from the meltdown at the hearing reveals someone who appeared to have been at her wits’ end.

The hearing before U.S. District Judge Jerry Blackwell was intended to focus on cases where the Department of Justice had not complied with court orders — specifically, orders around unlawfully detained people, including those who had been detained weeks beyond their court-ordered release dates or held under conditions when the judge specifically said no conditions were to be set.

One man, Blackwell highlighted, had been unlawfully detained by ICE for more than a week after he was ordered released. The federal government also put conditions on the man, such as forcing him to wear an ankle monitor, even though the judge had not requested any because the man had not been lawfully arrested or detained.

Addressing the issue of noncompliance, Le explained, was like “pulling teeth” where her requests for information or guidance from agency officials for next steps often took a “long, long, long time.”

She told Blackwell that she had gone so far as to threaten to quit in order to get cooperation from her superiors.

“Come on, if you guys don’t fix it, I’m going to quit and you are going to be dragging yourself into court,” she said, according to the transcript. “I did put in my resignation from the job too, but they couldn’t find a replacement. So I gave them a specific time and ― to get it done. If they don’t, then by all means, I’m going to walk out,” Le said. She concluded her account by telling the judge that she stayed in order to try to make sure the agency did ultimately follow court orders.

Le’s ranting — or her “candor,” as Blackwell called it — exposed not just one woman’s weariness inside a bureaucracy that she had by her own admission volunteered for. It is also an account of, in Le’s telling, the utter brokenness of the system at large and how easily people are getting crushed in its cogs.

Blackwell shared his concerns about the government’s failure to comply with court orders and said his sympathy was limited regarding the government’s gripes with the “growing number of requirements that the court puts in place upon the release of individuals.”

This chaos is the administration’s own doing, he explained, according to the transcript.

“We learn that somebody is put out on the street with just the clothes on their backs and have to figure out how to get back here when they should not have been arrested here in the first place, let alone flown halfway across the continent of North America,” he said. “We have to now say, ‘Bring them back.’ And then we say, ‘All right, so you brought them back.’ We can’t have them released when it’s minus 14 outside. And so now we have to address that. Don’t release them in circumstances that might endanger their health or safety.”

He continued: “And so once that’s addressed, then we learn they’ve been released, but now conditions have been imposed. That somebody who should not have been arrested in the first place is now being told, ‘You’re going to be released if you wear an ankle monitor,’ which the Court didn’t order because the person was unlawfully detained in the first place. Then we have to go back and address that now.”

Le claimed emails to her supervisors with “big bold font” often went ignored and that there was “no one” willing to come “explain and/or help to improve the system” when it came time to face off in court.

The DOJ and ICE bear some responsibility for Le’s frustrations, Blackwell said.

“And I hear the concerns about all the energy that this is causing the DOJ to expend, but, with respect, some of it is of your own making by not complying with orders. Do you understand that?” Blackwell said.

The Justice Department, he added, gives the court circuitous responses to his inquiries: DOJ officials will tell him that they will reach out to ICE for information about a case, and then he receives no response back — or, the response the court does receive is partial.

“[Which] then makes this some opaque sort of shield that I can’t really see behind to figure out why the orders aren’t being complied with,” Blackwell said. “And the answer cannot be that we called ICE and then a shoulder shrug.”

Other lawyers at the hearing, who were representing some of the individuals who had been unlawfully detained, urged the judge to impose sanctions to stop the “egregious, widespread pattern” of abuses from ICE and noted that a judge in another venue only last week highlighted that since Jan. 1, ICE has violated 96 court orders in just 74 cases.

“And we need this to be brought back into the Court’s control and into the Constitution’s control,” said Kira Kelley, an attorney representing two people unlawfully detained by ICE, according to the transcript.

Justice Department lawyers have regularly obfuscated on simple facts in court — like where a person is being detained, where they are going, or why a judge’s order wasn’t followed — since Donald Trump reentered office. Judges have generally shown patience and a great deference to the lines between executive and judicial powers, but that patience has worn thin.

In the hearing with Le, Blackwell appeared exasperated at the lack of “good faith” that administration lawyers have demonstrated as people’s lives and liberty hang in the balance.

“The individuals affected are people. The overwhelming majority of the hundreds seen by this Court have been found to be lawfully present as of now in the country. They live in their communities. Some are separated from their families. When a release order is not followed, the result is not just delay. In some instances, it is the continued detention of a person the Constitution does not permit the Government to hold and who should have been left alone, that is, not arrested in the first place,” he said.

“The DOJ, the DHS, and ICE are not above the law. They do wield extraordinary power, and that power has to exist within constitutional limits. When court orders are not followed, it’s not just the Court’s authority that’s at issue. It is the rights of individuals in custody and the integrity of the constitutional system itself.”