Obey court orders or face contempt
ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) — Minnesota’s chief federal judge issued a stern warning Thursday to the state’s federal attorney general as well as Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, warning them that they must comply with court orders or face criminal contempt charges.
Chief Justice Patrick Schiltz, appointed to the bench by President George W. Bush, and seen as conservative He objected to an email he received on Feb. 9 from U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen in which he accused the prosecutor of exaggerating ICE’s failure to comply with Trump administration orders. crackdown on immigration enforcement in Minnesota.
His order on Thursday includes a number of critical and sometimes hurtful Statements and rulings by federal judges in Minnesota and elsewhere around the country against the Trump administration’s attempted mass deportation of immigrants, often citing violations of due process and standards of humane treatment.
In a motion filed Thursday by a different judge, civil division chief Rosen and ICE representatives were ordered to appear at a contempt hearing Tuesday for failure to comply with court orders regarding the return of detainees’ property.
Schiltz has previously described ICE as a serial violator of court orders on the matter. wave of sanctions. In his Jan. 28 order, he expressed “serious concerns” after federal judges in Minnesota found 96 orders that ICE violated in 74 cases. In Thursday’s order, Schiltz said the government’s response “was not to do a better job of complying with the court’s orders, but instead to attack the Court.”
Rosen told Schiltz that his own review of a “statistically strong sample” of 12 of those 74 cases found a high rate of compliance, and complained that the justices’ calculation was “far beyond the bounds of accuracy for an order that would be so public and so sharply enforced. The lawyers in my law department did not deserve this.”
Schiltz wrote in the new order filed Thursday that he asked judges and law clerks to review the numbers. While they said they discovered some errors that cut both ways, they concluded that ICE violated 97 orders in the 66 cases cited in its earlier decision.
“This Court has increasingly had to use the threat of civil contempt to compel ICE to comply with orders,” he wrote. “The Court is not aware of any other instance in the history of the United States in which a federal court had to threaten contempt – over and over again – to force the United States government to comply with court orders.”
The chief judge also included a list documenting 113 additional violations of the order in 77 additional cases, mostly since the original tally.
“The judges of this District were extraordinarily patient with the government lawyers, aware that they had been placed in an impossible position by Rosen and his superiors at the Justice Department,” Schiltz wrote. wave of resignations there is this We left Rosen’s office complete. “What these lawyers ‘didn’t deserve’ was the Administration sending 3,000 ICE agents to Minnesota to detain people without making any provision to handle the hundreds of cases that were sure to follow.”
Neither Rosen nor ICE officials immediately responded to a request for comment.
Rosen said at a news conference Wednesday, his first since taking office in October, that the prosecutor’s team dropped dramatically. He got angry when told there were at least two people criminal cases dropped in recent days, partly due to losses. Rosen said there were 64 assistant U.S. attorneys in the office on the last day of his predecessor’s term; 47 as of Rosen’s first day; and is now down to 36. But he also emphasized that he was hiring new prosecutors “at a good pace” and that his office still has the capacity to prosecute major crimes.
The chief judge concluded with a stern warning:
“This Court will continue to do whatever is necessary to uphold the rule of law, including moving to the use of criminal contempt if necessary,” he wrote. “One way or another, ICE will comply with this Court’s orders.”
