The chief federal judge in Minnesota threatened to pursue criminal contempt charges against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the state’s top federal prosecutor if they don’t comply with court orders in scores of immigration cases.
On Thursday, Chief Judge Patrick Schiltz of the U.S. District Court in Minnesota accused ICE of failing to follow dozens of court directives. At least 97 violations involving 66 different cases had been documented, according to the judge’s order, along with an additional 113 alleged breaches of court orders in other matters.
“One way or another, ICE will comply with this court’s orders,” Schiltz wrote in his filing. He warned that repeated noncompliance could force the court to move beyond civil enforcement measures to criminal contempt, which could carry fines or even imprisonment for responsible officials.
Schiltz’s rebuke comes amid heightened scrutiny of federal immigration enforcement in Minnesota. ICE detained thousands of people during Operation Metro Surge, an immigration crackdown that drew widespread protests. Border czar Tom Homan announced the end of the operation earlier this month.
Schiltz previously released a list of court orders that ICE allegedly violated in January, prompting the court to threaten civil contempt proceedings.
“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,” Schiltz wrote on Thursday.
Schiltz highlighted in his order a Feb. 9 email from Minnesota’s U.S. attorney, Daniel Rosen, in which Rosen disputed the court’s accounting of ICE’s violations and accused the court of “wildly overstating the extent of ICE’s noncompliance with orders.”
In the email, Rosen vowed to “redouble our efforts to achieve compliance,” but said “the lawyers in my civil division didn’t deserve” to be criticized “so publicly and so sharply” by the court.
Schiltz responded by ordering a re-evaluation, which confirmed numerous instances of noncompliance, and he dismissed Rosen’s arguments that his findings were inaccurate.
“The judges of this District have been extraordinarily patient with the government attorneys, recognizing that they have been put in an impossible position by Rosen and his superiors in the Department of Justice,” Schiltz wrote. “What those attorneys ‘didn’t deserve’ was the Administration sending 3000 ICE agents to Minnesota to detain people without making any provision for handling the hundreds of lawsuits that were sure to follow.”
Schiltz’s scathing order follows the departure of several federal prosecutors over the Justice Department’s handling of Operation Metro Surge cases, and as federal judges nationwide have accused the Trump administration of bucking court orders.
Ebony Davis is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW based in Washington, D.C. She previously worked at CNN as a campaign reporter covering elections and politics.