

The long term problem is that lawyers are often not stupid, and they can see that working for this DOJ will have deleterious effects on their future careers when this stuff is over. I’ve heard that the Minneapolis office is down to 9 attorneys, and should be staffed for 50.
But the immediate problem here dates back to Rumsfeld v. Padilla*. In that case, the supreme court decided that habeas petitions must be filed in the district of actual, physical confinement. This created a race condition, where ICE is trying to get these people out of Minnesota as fast as possible, and these people’s lawyers are trying to file the lawsuits in Minnesota before their clients physically leave the state. ICE would prefer for these petitions to be filed in Texas, because the Texas district courts are a lot more favorable to them. The Minnesota lawyers don’t want to have to file in Texas, both because it’s a disadvantage to them, and because they aren’t admitted to practice in Texas, and it’s a big hassle to work around that.
Combine that with Trump v. CASA, and no one wants to try a habeas class action. So you have a crap ton of individualized habeas petitions, all over the same issue, which is ICE’s incorrect interpretation of federal immigration law. And in many, many of these cases, they properly got filed in Minnesota, but the prisoners got shipped to Texas anyway. The Minnesota judges are figuring out that all these cases are the same, and they’re making the decisions real fast now, and ICE is not keeping up, by design. It’s a total logistical cluster.
*Yes, it’s that Donald Rumsfeld, and that Jose Padilla, the dirty bomb guy.








My guess is that the ICE and DHS people who are breaking the law have figured out not to tell the attorneys this stuff, for precisely this reason. The attorneys have a duty of candor to the court, but ICE does not.
She may already be doing this, at least with respect to 100% dilatory motions. I haven’t kept up with her case work.
In this case, and in many others like it in MN, the petitioners already won their case. They’ve been ordered to be released, but they aren’t getting released in a timely manner.
When a judge issues a release order, it is the responsibility of the federal attorney to communicate the contents of that order into the federal bureaucracy, to ensure it is carried out. That process has turned into an all-consuming job, because that’s how ICE wants it.
I agree in general, though, that the only ethical or moral move here is to resign.