ICE Is Crashing the US Court System in Minnesota

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operation in Minnesota is pushing the United States court system to its breaking point.

Since Operation Metro Surge began in December, federal immigration agents have arrested some 4,000 people, according to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The result is an avalanche of cases filed in the US district court in Minnesota on behalf of people challenging their imprisonment by federal immigration enforcement agents. According to WIRED’s review of court records and official judicial statistics, attorneys filed nearly as many so-called habeas corpus petitions in Minnesota alone as were filed across the US during an entire year.

The bombardment of cases filed in federal court in Minnesota and other states is the result of two Trump administration policies: a dramatic increase in the number of people being detained, and the elimination of a key legal mechanism for securing their release. The result is a US court system in collapse: Judges, immigration attorneys, and federal prosecutors are all overwhelmed, while the people at the center of these cases remain behind bars, often in states thousands of miles from their home—many after judges have ordered their release.

“I’ve never said the word habeas so many times in my life,” says Graham Ojala-Barbour, a Minnesota immigration attorney who has been practicing for over a decade. Ojala-Barbour says that when he goes to sleep, his dreams are about habeas petitions.

Exhaustion is endemic. On February 3, one now-former special assistant US attorney, Julie Le, begged a US judge in Minnesota to hold her in contempt so she could finally rest. She was listed on 88 cases, according to data obtained via PACER, the US court records database. Daniel Rosen, the US attorney for the district of Minnesota and head of Le’s office, previously told that judge in a letter that they were “struggling to keep up with the immense volume” of petitions and had let at least one court order demanding the return of a petitioner slip through the cracks. Le did not respond to a request for comment. In response to a request for comment, the Minnesota US Attorney’s Office sent an automatic reply stating that they currently lacked a public information officer.

Le was reportedly fired after the February hearing, where she told the judge, “This job sucks.”

In response to a request for comment, DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said, “The Trump administration is more than prepared to handle the legal caseload necessary to deliver President Trump’s deportation agenda for the American people.”

As hard as the workload may be for US attorneys, the situation is far more dire for people detained by immigration authorities. In court filings, people who have been detained describe being packed into cells that were so full that they couldn’t even sit down before being flown to detention centers in Texas. One described having to share cells with people who were sick with Covid. Others said agents repeatedly pressured them and other detainees to self-deport.

McLaughlin told WIRED, “All detainees are provided with proper meals, water, medical treatment, and have opportunities to communicate with their family members and lawyers. All detainees receive full due process.”

Ana Voss, the civil division chief for the Minnesota US Attorney’s Office, has been listed as one of the attorneys defending the government in nearly all the habeas petition cases filed in Minnesota since Operation Metro Surge began. Before December, the majority of cases associated with Voss were about other issues, such as social security and disability lawsuits. Since then, habeas petitions for immigrant detainees have dramatically overtaken all other matters.