“I wish you would just hold me in contempt of court so I can get 24 hours of sleep,” a lawyer representing Donald Trump’s government told a federal judge on Tuesday. Julie Le, the lawyer, who was temporarily detailed to the US Attorney’s Office in Minneapolis, was assigned to 88 federal court cases in under a month — a crushing workload that would make even the most diligent attorney beg for mercy.
Trump’s occupation of Minneapolis has broken the Justice Department
This DOJ is no longer capable of doing its job.
Ian Millhiser is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he focuses on the Supreme Court, the Constitution, and the decline of liberal democracy in the United States. He received a JD from Duke University and is the author of two books on the Supreme Court.
Le, moreover, was in court after federal district Judge Jerry Blackwell ordered her and her co-counsel to explain why the Trump administration had not complied with a January 27 order requiring it to release an individual from US custody. As Blackwell’s order demanding an explanation laid out, the government also did not respond to a January 31 order threatening to hold it in contempt.
It’s not a mystery why Trump’s government is unable to comply with court orders, or even respond to judges threatening contempt. As Patrick Schiltz, the chief judge in Minnesota’s federal district court, explained in a January 26 order, the Trump administration “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.”
Trump, in other words, deployed thousands of armed law enforcement officers to harass and arrest people in Minneapolis, without sending enough lawyers to handle all of the federal court cases that would inevitably result from Trump’s occupation of Minnesota. So, when a judge issues an order commanding the government to release a detainee or to take some other action, there’s often no lawyer available to respond to that order.
Worse, Trump’s government appears either unwilling or unable to comply with court orders even when one of its lawyers does engage with a particular case. Le reportedly told Blackwell at Tuesday’s hearing that it is like “pulling teeth” to get the Trump administration to comply with these orders. “It takes 10 emails from me for a release condition to be corrected,” Le said. “It takes me threatening to walk out for something else to be corrected.”
Minnesota’s federal judges, meanwhile, have resorted to extraordinary tactics to break this logjam. In his January 26 order, for example, Schiltz ordered Todd Lyons, the acting director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, to personally appear in court and explain the government’s inability to comply with his previous order, unless the immigrant named in that order was swiftly released. This tactic appears to have worked, because the man was released.
But, while Schiltz’s tactic successfully got the Trump administration to comply with a single court order, the administration is still out of compliance with numerous others. In a January 28 order, Schiltz listed “96 court orders that ICE has violated in 74 cases.”
Trump, in other words, appears to have broken the Department of Justice. It simply does not have the personnel it needs to respond to all of the legal violations committed by ICE in Minneapolis. And it is likely that this problem is going to get much worse.
If you are a lawyer, and you are thinking about working for the Justice Department, don’t
It is likely that Le’s moment of honesty in Blackwell’s courtroom will follow her for the rest of her career. Any future potential employer who Googles her name will find an array of news articles about the time that she asked a federal judge to hold her in contempt.
This stigma will follow her, moreover, despite the fact that there’s no evidence that she was incompetent or otherwise neglected her duties. Le, who previously served in a different government role, reportedly volunteered to help the Department of Justice with the crushing weight of cases it faced due to Trump’s occupation of Minneapolis. The DOJ rewarded her with an impossible workload that made her vulnerable to judicial sanctions.
There’s a lesson here for lawyers who are considering public service: Don’t work for Trump’s Justice Department or this can happen to you.
It is likely, moreover, that working conditions in Trump’s DOJ will only get worse. NBC News reported that Le is no longer working for the US Attorney’s Office in Minnesota after her courtroom confession, so now her 88 cases will need to be handled by some other already overworked lawyer. Her co-counsel, Ana Voss, is also “among those who have given their notices of resignation,” according to NBC.
Indeed, the US Attorney’s Office in Minnesota has hemorrhaged lawyers since the occupation of Minneapolis began. Six lawyers, including the office’s No. 2 attorney, resigned in protest last month after senior DOJ officials pushed them to open a criminal investigation into the widow of Renee Good, who was killed by federal immigration officer Jonathan Ross. Eight more attorneys have since either left the office or plan to leave, according to the Associated Press.
Nor are Justice Department lawyers outside of Minnesota safe from being pulled into the Minneapolis debacle. Bloomberg reported that all of the nation’s 93 US Attorney’s Offices were recently ordered to designate one or two lawyers who will join “emergency jump teams” that will assist DOJ offices that require “urgent assistance due to emergent or critical situations.”
The Justice Department, in other words, appears to be pulling lawyers off criminal prosecutions and civil defense of the US government, so they can deal with an outbreak of crises created by Trump’s policies.
The Trump administration is making things worse by misreading federal law
This is not just a problem of quantity. Another reason why DOJ lawyers are stretched so thin is that the Trump administration is detaining many immigrants without a legal basis to do so.
There’s no telling how many immigrants are illegally confined right now, but have yet to challenge that illegal detention because they haven’t been able to find a lawyer.
Consider, for example, Schiltz’s orders in Juan T.R. v. Noem, the case where he ordered ICE’s director to appear in court if an immigrant was not released. The Trump administration claimed that it must detain this immigrant, identified only as “Juan T.R.” in court documents, 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 an applicant for admission. He arrived in the United States around 1999. So this statute does not apply to him.
Nevertheless, the Trump administration has misread this law to detain numerous immigrants without legal justification. In a November 26 opinion, one federal judge wrote that the Trump administration’s misreading of this federal law “has been challenged in at least 362 cases in federal district courts.” As of that decision, the challengers had prevailed “in 350 of those cases decided by over 160 different judges sitting in about fifty different courts spread across the United States.”
So the courts are nearly unanimous in rejecting the Trump administration’s misreading of this law. But Trump’s government continues to illegally detain people nonetheless. There’s no telling how many immigrants are illegally confined right now, but have yet to challenge that illegal detention because they haven’t been able to find a lawyer.
Until fairly recently, federal courts might have responded to such widespread legal violations by issuing a “nationwide injunction,” a court order that bars the federal government from committing the same legal violation anywhere in the country. But the Supreme Court’s Republican majority recently limited lower courts’ power to issue such injunctions in Trump v. CASA (2025). And so these cases are being handled piecemeal, even though the Justice Department apparently lacks the personnel to respond to each individual case.
The Justice Department is likely to have a tough time finding good employees long after Trump leaves the White House
The consequences of the Minneapolis occupation are likely to be felt for years after Trump leaves office, even if Congress enacts legislation barring any future president from conducting a similar operation. One likely consequence is that the Justice Department will struggle to hire good people long after Trump is gone.
Experienced lawyers are fleeing the Justice Department, so the government will likely lose their skills and institutional knowledge forever. Many top applicants, meanwhile, will likely be reluctant to apply for Justice Department jobs out of fear that they will be placed in an impossible position, as Julie Le was.
The specter of DOGE, and similar Trump administration efforts to fire civil servants, looms over all federal jobs. The Justice Department typically pays much less than what its lawyers could earn in private practice, but it has historically been an attractive employer for elite attorneys because it offered job security and a predictable workload. Now that that’s no longer the case, many of the kind of high-powered lawyers who historically sought out Justice Department jobs are likely to decide that they are better off in private practice.
Meanwhile, judges appear to be losing confidence in the Justice Department’s lawyers, and in whether their statements in court can be trusted. It’s far from clear whether DOJ’s lawyers will regain that confidence once the United States has a new president.
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