A Closer Look At USDOJ Court Order Defiance

plus more.

The Trump DOJ Has Utterly Collapsed and It Ain’t Pretty

INSIDE: Patrick J. Schiltz … Stephen Miller … Mark Kelly

David Kurtz Feb 04, 2026

The Destruction: DOJ Edition

One of the intended consequences of President Trump’s politicization of the Justice Department is to leave behind a weakened, overwhelmed, decimated organization that simply can’t do its job.

They’re hollowing out the DOJ by purging nonpartisan career attorneys, making life intolerable for those who remain, and replacing them with loyalists sucks the capacity out of the organization. It can’t handle as many cases, isn’t capable of tackling ambitious ones, and the quality of the lawyering suffers in all cases.

This is all coming home to roost in a very visible way in Minnesota, where the lawless Operation Metro Surge has produced hundreds of habeas cases filed by wrongfully detained immigrants. The chief federal judge in Minnesota, speaking for an overwhelmed judiciary, has already publicly castigated the Trump administration for not preparing for the flood of cases that its mass deportation operation in the state was bound to generate. (Chris Geidner explains the ins and outs of why we’re seeing so many cases.)

Meanwhile, the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office has been crippled by mass resignations, including some of its most senior career attorneys. That has left the remaining DOJ attorneys in Minnesota inundated with more cases than they can keep up with. But I’m not sure that does justice to what’s been happening. It’s quite a bit worse than that.

The quality of lawyering has eroded to such a point that government lawyers have been unable to keep up with the court orders demanding that detainees be released. As a result, detainees have lingered in confinement even after courts have ordered their release.

Last week, as the Star Tribune first reported, Ana Voss, a career DOJer who was the chief of the civil division in the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office, submitted an astonishing court filing in which she admitted that her office had not followed a judicial order to release a detainee because they hadn’t seen the email.

“I did not timely read these orders,” Voss reportedly said in the court filing. “I understand that is inexcusable.”

But it doesn’t appear to be a case of incompetence or willful disregard. As Voss explained in the filing: “It has become apparent to me that I am not able to effectively triage and review every order which is not an acceptable practice for me or the United States.”

Voss is reported to have subsequently resigned.

Numerous reports have suggested that mass resignations in the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office are not due solely to the failure to investigate the fatal shootings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti. My suspicion is that the hell-on-wheels inundation of immigration cases is another contributing factor.

More evidence of that emerged yesterday, when Julie Le, an attorney for the government, essentially melted down in court, as FOX9’s Paul Blume reported :

“I wish you would just hold me in contempt of court so I can get 24 hours of sleep,” Le said. “The system sucks, this job sucks, I am trying with every breath I have to get you what I need.”

As Joyce Vance notes, Le is not a regular assistant U.S. attorney but a “special” AUSA. She is reported to have been working as a DHS attorney before being detailed to the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office to help with the flood of immigration cases. Le had been assigned over more than 88 cases since December.

It’s easy to see this as attorneys getting what they deserve for participating in a corrupted system, but remember it’s the detainees who are languishing despite courts ordering their release. I’ve seen defiant DOJ political appointees in court telling judges to shove it. Le does not appear to be one of those kinds of attorneys:

“I am here to make sure the agency understands how important it is to comply with court orders,” said Le, who became visibly emotional during the court hearing.

Le was removed from the U.S. Attorney’s Office after her courtroom remarks, NBC News reports.

When chief Judge Patrick J. Schiltz said last week that the Trump administration had violated 96 court orders in 78 cases since Jan. 1 in Minnesota alone, I first thought this was another Trump administration gambit to defy the judicial branch. And it may be, but it’s not as direct as the confrontations in the Alien Enemies Act and Abrego Garcia cases.

As Princeton’s Deborah Pearlstein notes:

It seems increasingly clear the rampant noncompliance with court habeas orders happening in immigration cases now is not a problem of attorney ethics. It’s a symptom of structural, institutional collapse at the Department of Justice.

The Trump administration is tearing down U.S. Attorney’s offices and undermining Main Justice so that there simply aren’t the resources to even respond to the judicial branch. A burn it all down ethos. Catch me if you can.

Keep an Eye on This One …

U.S. District Judge Paul Magnuson of Minneapolis ordered the pretrial release of two immigrants accused of assaulting an ICE agent who shot one of the men in an incident last month. But the men did not make it out of the courthouse before they were re-detained, by ICE, the Star Tribune reports.

Attorneys for Alfredo Aljorna and Julio Sosa-Celis were quickly back in court, filing a habeas petition seeking their release from ICE custody. Last night, chief Judge Patrick J. Schiltz ordered the Trump administration not to remove the men from Minnesota and, if they already had, then to return them to Minnesota immediately.

Not to get overlooked: At the pretrial hearing, the mens’ attorneys introduced into evidence photos of the shooting scene that suggest the ICE agent shot through a closed door and undermine the government’s account what happened.

Quote of the Day

“In the last few weeks, our family took some consolation thinking that perhaps Nee’s death would bring about change in our country. And it has not.”—Luke Ganger, brother of Renee Good

Judge Protects Anti-ICE Protesters

U.S. District Judge Michael Simon issued a temporary restraining order barring federal agents from using tear gas and other crowd-control weapons against peaceful protesters and journalists outside an ICE facility in Portland, Oregon.

In his order, Simon was harshly critical of the Trump administration:

“the repeated shooting and teargassing of nonviolent protesters at the Portland ICE Building will likely keep recurring … Defendants’ violence is in no way isolated.”
“statements made by DHS officials and senior federal executives show that the culture of the agency and its employees is to celebrate violent responses over fair and diplomatic ones.”
“Rather than reprimanding DHS violence against protesters, senior officials have publicly condoned it.”
“There are clear instances of excessive force, including a use of force incident recorded by ICE’s own cameras and deemed “inappropriate” and “not reasonable” by a Federal Protective Service (“FPS”) Deputy Regional Director. Yet, the agents involved were not put on leave and do not appear to have been held accountable in any way.”

(snip-Stephen Miller and more)

https://open.substack.com/pub/tpmmorningmemo/p/the-trump-doj-has-utterly-collapsed?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

MS Now ICE clips and some guest democrats.

The video below has people recounting the gang thug brutality of ICE attacking and shooting people doing nothing wrong. ICE thugs were totally out of control and had no respect for civil rights or the lives of the people they attacked. The ICE thugs seemed to be jacked up in rage by some substance and enjoyed causing pain and being cruel. Hugs

The video below details how the ICE gang thugs were bragging about shooting innocent people. The thugs did not care how brutal they were with the woman but instead seemed to relish being allowed to be so brutal. Hugs

The video below details the conditions at the ICE concentration camp, including that a 2 month old baby is being held there. Hugs

‘My own government attempted to execute me’: Victims of ICE and Border Patrol aggression testify

Witness testimony at a congressional hearing. I will post clips of their testimonys from MS Now. But please watch this. These are US citizens who committed no crime but being of Hispanic ethnicity. The agent who shot one of the witnesses bragged about it. These descriptions are something we wouldn’t believe it couldn’t happen here, but they are under the fascist government of Stephen Miller. These gang thugs do not think of these people as humans. This is no different from the way Jewish people were treated in Nazi Germany. The thugs were laughing at the disabled woman with a brain injury. They were totally willing to let this woman die. Plus currently there is no way for these assaulted people to recover lost / damaged property and income, and when taken to the hospital for emergency care due to their being assulted / shot by ICE gang thugs the people assaulted have to pay the cost of their treatment, not ICE or the government! Hugs

‘Hellbent’: Trump is reassembling his 2020 coup crew amid 2026 midterm panic

ICE’s Grim Concentration Camps Exposed

Chuck Schumer Is So F***king Mad Now

Jewish Seniors Offer To Hide Haitian Immigrants From ICE

5-year-old Liam Ramos and father return to Minneapolis after release from ICE facility

MS Now clips dealing with ICE

ICE took a 10 yr old girl and shipped her to Texas. They are taking children. Conditions are horrible in the concentration camp in Texas. The mother and child were legally in the country. The panel discusses mass deportation and the new authorites / power ICE has given it self but is illegal Hugs

The video below shows ICE stopping and assaulting US citizens who were only following the ICE thugs. They are out of control and do not want to be videoed doing their illegal actions so they feel free to assault and detain people for just using their civil rights under the constitution. Hugs

As To DOJ’s Indictment Of Judge Boasberg:

I’m only about half-through reading this, and already know everyone else needs to see this, too. It’s important to keep up with the attacks on the judiciary. Only a decent-sized snippet here, but do go finish it. This is well written, and it informs. -A.

207. The Justice Department Beclowns Itself (Again)

The denouement of DOJ’s misconduct complaint against Chief Judge Boasberg provides useful lessons relating to both the Department’s continuing misbehavior and the emptiness of calls for impeachment.

Steve Vladeck Feb 02, 2026

There is, as ever, too much court- (and Court-)adjacent news to cover, including this morning’s New York Times double-feature on the Chief Justice’s move to have Court employees sign non-disclosure agreements and on the Times’s own expanding coverage of the Court. But I wanted to use today’s “Long Read” to come back to a post I wrote last July—shortly after the Department of Justice submitted (and then Attorney General Bondi tweeted about) an unprecedented judicial misconduct complaint against the chief judge of the D.C. federal district court, James E. Boasberg. As I wrote at the time, DOJ’s complaint was “almost laughably preposterous.” The gravamen of its charge was that Boasberg had violated the Code of Conduct for United States Judges by relaying (at a private breakfast with the Chief Justice and a group of other district judges before a meeting of the Judicial Conference of the United States) that several of his colleagues were worried about the Trump administration potentially defying their rulings.

That complaint is back in the news because late last week, we finally learned about its outcome. After a bit of procedural shuffling that I’ll explain below, it was dismissed, quite cursorily, by Sixth Circuit Chief Judge Jeffrey Sutton in a … brusque … seven-page memorandum and order. Not only did Sutton pour cold water on DOJ’s theor(ies) of Boasberg’s misconduct, but he also expressed understandable frustration with the fact that DOJ never produced the document that it claimed memorialized Boasberg’s alleged misconduct—even after it was specifically told that it needed to do so to substantiate its claims.

In other words, after filing an unprecedented complaint against a sitting federal judge, making a big public stink about it (which, by the way, was itself a violation of the law), and having its complaint invoked as one of the grounds for the proposed impeachment charges against Chief Judge Boasberg, DOJ … never followed through. It turns out, it was never about adjudicating Boasberg’s behavior; it was about making splashy headlines and fueling right-wing attacks on the judiciary without regard to whether DOJ’s specious charges would withstand meaningful scrutiny.

The obvious takeaway is that the Department of Justice has once again beclowned itself. I’d say it has shredded even more of its credibility, but when you’re publicly soliciting for new lawyers to apply via Twitter (with the primary qualification being that they “support President Trump”), there may not be any credibility left to shred. Instead, the more significant takeaway is that this really ought to be the final nail in the coffin of congressional Republicans’ breathless efforts to gin up impeachment charges against a judge whose only actual sin, as it turns out, was to decline to roll over when the government defied one of his orders, and then lied about it.

(snip-graphic of pleading filed; just click through to see it. Then there is info on other cases of which we may want to be at least aware, then back to this one; a bit more below. Use this link to skip the other cases and get back to this.)

The One First “Long Read”:
The Denouement of the Boasberg Misconduct Mess

My post from last July walked through the background and details of the Justice Department’s judicial misconduct complaint against Chief Judge Boasberg (and why it suffered from four independently fatal defects). I’d encourage folks to refer back to that post if you could use more context.

In a nutshell, DOJ’s chief accusation was that Boasberg had violated the Code of Conduct for United States Judges by publicly suggesting that he had “pre-judged” the merits of specific cases involving the Trump administration (even though, in fact, Boasberg had only privately relayed concerns that his colleagues had raised about how the Trump administration might behave in unnamed future cases). Indeed, at the time Boasberg made the relevant comments, the lawsuit in which his interactions with the Trump administration have been most visible—the J.G.G. Alien Enemies Act case—hadn’t even been filed yet. Nonetheless, DOJ decided to make hay out of Boasberg’s alleged misbehavior, and six Republican senators have since piled on by urging D.C. Circuit Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan (who, by law, was the recipient of DOJ’s misconduct complaint) to suspend Boasberg while the complaint (and a potential impeachment investigation) was pending.2

The process created by the Judicial Conduct and Disability Act of 1980 is supposed to be almost entirely confidential (which is why Attorney General Bondi’s tweet announcing the complaint was itself likely a violation of the act). But we often learn about the dispositions, at least, once the complaint has been fully resolved. That’s why we learned last week about the result of DOJ’s complaint; not only had Chief Judge Sutton dismissed it, but the 30-day period within which DOJ could have sought further review of Sutton’s decision (by filing a “petition for review” with the full Sixth Circuit Judicial Council) had expired.3

As for how DOJ’s complaint made its way to Sutton, Sutton’s memorandum explains the procedural history:

On November 26, in view of several appellate challenges to the judge’s rulings in the underlying case [J.G.G.] and of concerns that the judges on the D.C. Circuit might have to recuse themselves from any proceedings before the Judicial Council, Chief Judge Srinivasan asked Chief Justice Roberts to transfer the judicial misconduct proceeding to another circuit. On December 5, the Chief Justice transferred the matter to the Judicial Council of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit for resolution.

Sutton, who I have to think the Chief Justice did not pick at random (Roberts could have referred the complaint to any of the chief judges of the other circuits), made quick work of DOJ’s complaint—dismissing it just two weeks after he received it. His seven-page ruling is worth reading—not just for its thoroughness, but because, if you’re not used to reading these kinds of rulings, it is all-but-dripping with contempt for the Department of Justice’s behavior.

In short, Sutton found four different problems with DOJ’s complaint:

(snip. Yup, you know you want to know, so go read his piece and give it a like if you care to, after you finish.)

https://open.substack.com/pub/stevevladeck/p/207-the-justice-department-beclowns?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web