The chief judge of Minnesota’s federal district court, a George W. Bush appointee who clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia, just issued a remarkable order commanding the head of ICE to appear personally before him to explain why he should not be held in contempt of court.
Chief Judge Patrick Schiltz’s order in Juan T.R. v. Noem seeks to enforce a fairly straightforward decision he handed down earlier this month.
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested an immigrant man, identified only as “Juan T.R.” in court documents, and sought to detain him under a provision of federal law that calls for detention “in the case of an alien who is an applicant for admission.” But Juan is not applying to be admitted to the United States. According to Schiltz’s original order, Juan arrived in the United States around 1999. So the Trump administration’s legal justification for detaining him is simply inapplicable to this case.
Accordingly, Schiltz ordered ICE to either provide Juan with a bond hearing within seven days, or to immediately release him from detention. That order is dated January 14.
Schiltz’s second order, meanwhile, is dated January 26 — five days after the original seven day deadline expired — and it notes that “Juan has not received a bond hearing and remains detained.” Worse, Schiltz writes that his January 14 order is “one of dozens of court orders with which [the Trump administration has] failed to comply in recent weeks.”
In some cases, according to Schiltz, the Trump administration has instead extended detention without justification. In others, it has flown “an alien who should remain in Minnesota” to Texas — sometimes releasing them there and telling them to “figure out a way to get home.”
And so, after declaring that “the Court’s patience is at an end,” Schiltz ordered “Todd Lyons, the Acting Director of ICE, to appear personally before the Court and show cause why he should not be held in contempt of Court.” Schiltz’s order also states that Lyons may miss this January 30 hearing, and avoid contempt, if Juan is released from custody prior to the hearing.
The courts are losing patience with the Trump administration’s incompetence
One of the most striking lines in Schiltz’s order suggests a reason why ICE has been unable to comply with court orders. The Trump administration, the judge writes, “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.”
Indeed, if anything, the Department of Justice has lost capacity to respond to these petitions and lawsuits since Trump’s occupation of Minneapolis began. At least six DOJ attorneys in Minnesota, including the second-in-command lawyer in the US Attorney’s Office, resigned after the Trump administration pressed for a criminal investigation into the widow of Renee Good, who was killed by federal immigration officer Jonathan Ross on January 7.
Nor is Schiltz the only judge who has threatened sanctions or other harsh consequences against the Trump administration or its officials because of their incompetence.
On Monday, for example, Judge Katherine Menendez, who is hearing a lawsuit brought by the state of Minnesota that seeks to end the occupation of Minneapolis, ordered the Justice Department to explain a letter from Attorney General Pam Bondi. That letter indicated that the purpose of the occupation was to coerce Minnesota into making several policy concessions to Trump, including turning over the state’s voter rolls.
While the federal government may sometimes withdraw federal funds from a state that does not comply with certain congressional demands, it may not use force against a state’s citizens in order to coerce the state into changing its policies. Such a use of force violates the 10th Amendment.
Nor is Lyons the only Trump administration official that a judge threatened with sanctions after they failed to comply with a court order. Earlier this month, a Trump-appointed judge in Richmond, Virginia threatened to disbar or otherwise discipline Lindsey Halligan, who was then a Justice Department lawyer, after she falsely claimed in a court filing that she was the US attorney in eastern Virginia. A federal court previously ruled that she does not hold that job.
Halligan has since left the Justice Department, according to NBC News.
Other judges have come very close to accusing Trump’s lawyers of lying to them in court proceedings. Even grand juries — which are normally known for rubber stamping prosecutors’ requests to indict a criminal suspect — have begun to doubt the Trump Justice Department’s claims. Just last September, grand juries in Washington, DC, alone refused to allow seven criminal cases to move forward.
By contrast, in all of 2016 — the last year before Trump took office the first time — federal prosecutors initiated over 155,000 criminal matters, and grand juries only refused an indictment in six of these cases.
It remains to be seen how much the Justice Department’s incompetence will matter, because the seniormost judges in the country are largely in the tank for Trump. In 2024, the Supreme Court’s Republican majority held that Trump may use the powers of the presidency to commit crimes.
Still, the Supreme Court hears only a tiny fraction of all federal court cases. So even if the Republican justices continue to run interference for the leader of their political party, it will be administratively quite difficult for Trump’s Justice Department to process all of the many thousands of cases it brings to federal court if the rank-and-file judges in those courts don’t trust them to be honest or to obey court orders.
Among other things, as Schiltz notes in his most recent order, hundreds of cases are likely to arise from the Minneapolis occupation, many of them involving straightforward violations of federal law, such as the Juan T.R. case. Even this Supreme Court is unlikely to intervene in every single case where a federal judge orders someone illegally detained by the Trump administration to be released.
