ST. PAUL, Minn. — A federal judge clashed Tuesday with Minnesota’s top federal prosecutor during an unusual contempt hearing that highlighted growing confrontations between increasingly frustrated judges and Department of Justice officials.
U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Bryan called Tuesday’s hearing to decide whether U.S. Attorney for the District of Minnesota Daniel N. Rosen and others should be held in contempt for not heeding orders to return the personal property of 28 of immigrants who had been detained and then ordered freed. The property ranges from cash to identity documents to clothing.
Bryan, who had said in calling for the hearing that there had been “numerous unlawful violations of court orders,” started Tuesday by saying it would be a “historic low point” for the U.S. attorney’s office if he held anyone in contempt.
“Your honor has made a remark smearing myself,” Rosen shot back. The judge later called for a break in the hearing to allow for a reset, acknowledging the two had “been a little testy and frosty with each other.”
Things were calmer in the afternoon, with Rosen saying on the witness stand that he takes an “acute interest” in compliance with the judge’s orders, and that compensation would be paid in the two cases where immigrants’ property was lost.
The cases “fall into the realm of human error,” he said.
Rosen’s office is facing a serious staff shortage. A series of prosecutors have left the office over the past year, including a recent group who left amid growing frustration with the administration’s immigration enforcement and the Justice Department’s response to two fatal shootings by federal officers in Minneapolis.
There has been a surge in recent weeks of judges issuing critical and sometimes scathing statements and rulings over the fallout from the administration’s attempts at mass immigrant deportations, with the Department of Justice appearing unable to always keep up with the flood of cases from the crackdown.
There was the district judge in Minnesota who took the rare step of finding an administration lawyer in contempt for failing to return identification documents to an immigrant, the judge in New York who decried ICE’s “abhorrent and illegal practices,” and the judge in West Virginia who chastised U.S. and state officials for jailing noncitizens indefinitely.
The government “incredulously asserts that the federal district courts do not have jurisdiction, that petitioners cannot raise due process violations, and that the Government has authority to mandatorily and indefinitely detain noncitizens in the local jail,” U.S. District Judge Joseph Goodwin said in his order.
“The government is wrong,” he continued. “Judges in this district have said that over and over and over again.”
The chief federal judge for Minnesota has repeatedly grabbed national attention with his warnings.
“ICE is not a law unto itself,” Chief Judge Patrick Schiltz wrote in late January about the government’s repeated failures to comply with court orders during Operation Metro Surge, the immigration crackdown that shook Minneapolis and the surrounding region.
Last week, Schiltz, who was appointed to the bench by President George W. Bush and is seen as a conservative, said Rosen and ICE officials must comply with court orders or risk criminal contempt charges.
“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.
The administration has blamed judges for the crisis, accusing them of failing to follow the law and rushing cases.
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Sullivan contributed from Minneapolis.
