A lawyer working with the Minnesota attorney’s office said she just wants some sleep, after working so hard to try to get ICE to follow court orders.
“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.”
Edit clarification: This attorney works for the federal government, not the State of Minnesota.
It’s not as if ICE is going to stop kidnapping people if they [the DOJ] run out of lawyers.
Staying on and trying to make the system work sounds like the most moral option to me. It also sounds fruitless.
Edit: This article doesn’t have a ton of detail, and it’s pretty hard for an outsider with no legal background (like me) to understand what the players involved are trying to do. These stories have some more details:
MPR News: ICE attorney to judge: ‘This job sucks’
The Independent: ‘This job sucks’: DOJ lawyer asks to be held in contempt so she can sleep after judge accuses ICE of blowing court orders
See also OP’s comment.
Special Assistant U.S. Attorney Julie Le is described as a volunteer. I don’t know if that means she’s getting paid or not. She is working to get ICE to comply with court orders to release people. My guess is that if everyone in her position were to resign in protest, ICE would just ignore the courts completely, and wouldn’t release anyone at all anymore.
This is an attack, a deliberate stratagem, by the executive, on the justice system, and it sounds to me like Julie Le is caught up in that attack, not a perpetrator of it.
If she stays on and the federal court holds her in contempt and punishes her, maybe Donald will pardon her, so she still gets her money. So no, it’s not moral.
What could she do? She could say what exactly the feds are doing wrong, for example, with federal officers’ names and dates and details. Create the record. She could refuse to file motions supporting the feds. Then the people would win those uncontested cases. Those would be relatively moral. But she made it about herself, and that’s hogwash.
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.
I think the problem is her not properly informing the judge WHY she is being stonewalled or ignored by her company. The judge holding her in contempt is probably not going to do anything because ICE doesn’t give a fuck. So she should name names who WILL give a fuck so that they will be held in contempt.
She’s the one who asked the judge to hold her in contempt so she can get some rest because she’s the one working to get ICE to follow court orders to release people. It was a tongue in cheek comment on how overworked she is.
She’s not being held in contempt because of her actions.
No but I was replying to her complaining that she found the job terrible and tiring: she kinda signed up for it. So ya know… Cry me a fucking river…
Ah; but what she wants to do is be found in contempt, so all the immigrants go free and ICE stays tied up in court. It’s an interesting strategy.