A federal judge is hauling government lawyers from nearly 30 immigration cases into his courtroom to decide whether to hold them in contempt for repeatedly violating his orders.
In an order on Thursday, Minnesota District Judge Jeffrey M. Bryan said the Trump administration ignored orders to release “unlawfully detained” immigrants at the center of the cases and failed to return their belongings.
Immigration authorities unlawfully held their “cash, cellphones, jewelry, driver’s licenses, work permits, passports, clothing, and other identification and immigration documents,” according to Bryan, who was nominated by former President Joe Biden.
Bryan had earlier warned that Trump officials would face contempt proceedings if they failed to comply with his orders by Wednesday. A hearing on the matter is now scheduled for March 3.
A DOJ spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Independent.
The contempt hearing follows an avalanche of court rulings against the Trump administration’s efforts to rapidly detain and deport thousands of immigrants, with judges routinely finding that officers unlawfully detained them — and then failed to follow through on court orders after being overloaded by lawsuits.
Judges within the last week have held at least two government attorneys in civil contempt for failing to follow orders in immigration cases, according to documents reviewed by The Independent.
Last week, Minnesota District Judge Laura M. Provinzino held a federal prosecutor in civil contempt for “flagrant disobedience of court orders” in the case of a noncitizen swept up in Trump’s surge of immigration officers in the state.
Provinzino ordered Special Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew Isihara to pay $500 a day until the government returned a man’s identification documents after his release. The contempt was purged after his documents were returned.
This week, Trump appointee Judge Eric C. Tostrud of Minnesota found the administration in civil contempt for transferring an ICE detainee to Texas in violation of his order and then releasing him without his belongings.
The judge ordered the administration to refund him $568 for the cost of a plane ticket home.
The administration’s attempts to arrest and deport tens of thousands of people from the country — without giving them much of a chance to fight their cases before they’re indefinitely jailed in immigration detention centers — have triggered an avalanche of lawsuits that are overwhelming courts and prosecutors.
Dozens of new habeas corpus petitions — the lawsuits immigrants have filed to challenge the constitutionality of their arrest and detention — are hitting court dockets every week. Government attorneys are overwhelmed or quitting in droves under pressure to fight them at an unsustainable pace.
Judges have argued that it’s a crisis of the administration’s own making.
Officials “have chosen to avail themselves of these exact circumstances of which they now complain,” wrote California District Judge Sunshine Sykes, whose order this month commanded the government to let detainees challenge their detentions.
In New Jersey, government lawyers recently admitted to violating roughly 50 orders stemming from more than 500 cases.
“What do you want me to do? The system sucks. This job sucks,” one government lawyer told a judge in Minnesota last month.
Julie Le, a lawyer for ICE who was drafted to help with the caseload in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Minnesota, was removed from that detail days after her outburst in court.
The same month, Minnesota’s chief federal judge ripped into the administration after he found ICE violated nearly 100 court orders stemming from the recent surge of officers into the state, or “more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence.”
“ICE has every right to challenge the orders of this court,” wrote Judge Patrick J. Schiltz. “But, like any litigant, ICE must follow those orders unless and until they are overturned or vacated.”
Officials at the Justice Department and DHS have labeled judges “activists” and “rogue” members of the judiciary in public statements criticizing the decisions but have rarely appealed them.
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller — who has spearheaded Trump’s immigration crackdown — has repeatedly railed against federal judges. “Each day the nation arises to see what the craziest unelected local federal judge has decided the policies of the government of the United States shall be,” he wrote on X in March. “It is madness.”
Aiming to reduce the court system’s backlog, the administration has sought to recruit “deportation judges” through a set of provocative ads.
The series of court rulings come as Americans voice growing concerns over the immigration enforcement efforts carried out by the Trump administration, which has vowed to carry out the largest deportation program in U.S. history.
According to a February survey from Quinnipiac, 63 percent of Americans disapprove of the way ICE is enforcing immigration laws. A Marist poll conducted the same month found 65 percent of respondents believe ICE has “gone too far” with its tactics, up from 54 percent in June.
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