DoJ Lawyer Failed to Understand the Assignment

Delay, deny, and dissemble is the job description; destruction of the justice system is the goal.

Julie T. Le, Esq., has gotten headlines for her startling comments this week to District Court Judge Jerry Blackwell in the U.S. District Court in Minnesota. Ms. Le, a government attorney normally assigned to handle ICE administrative cases, had volunteered to assist the Department of Justice handle immigration-related habeas cases. Ms. Le was quickly to find out that no good deed goes unpunished.

After just a month in the DoJ assignment, Ms. Le was summoned before Judge Blackwell to answer for his frustration over persistent noncompliance with his orders to release people from unlawful detention. When Judge Blackwell mentioned contempt, Ms. Le appeared to double down when she said that she hoped that the judge would send her to jail so that she could get some sleep.1

This exchange made headlines, but this was not just a “take this job and shove it” moment. Ms. Le’s comments were made as part of a honest exchange with Judge Blackwell about her prodigious and well-intentioned efforts to have wrongfully held detainees released as quickly as possible. She was ready to quit out of frustration with institutional incompetence and inaction, but she stayed on the job because there was no one else to take her place, and she was committed to getting as many wrongfully detained people as possible released.

As a Department of Justice attorney in the current administration, Ms. Le was a complete failure. Clearly she did not get the proverbial memo laying out her obligations – not to the court, or to her oath as an attorney, or to justice or morality, but to the current administration’s obstructive agenda. If Ms. Le had wanted to keep her DoJ job, she would have understood that “Operation Metro Surge” was intended not only to overwhelm the government and people of Minneapolis, it was intended to overwhelm the justice system and hamper the authority of the federal courts. Ms. Le would have stonewalled Judge Blackwell and modeled her behavior after that of Attorney General Pam Bondi (calling out federal jurists as “rogue judges”)2, or Lindsey Halligan (pretend U.S. Attorney who simply ignored court orders declaring her appointment illegal).3

What Ms. Le did instead was to help lay bare for the court and the public the abject abuse taking place in the immigration detention system that is being operated by the Department of Homeland Security with the assistance of the Department of Justice. Here is what Kira Kelley, one of the attorneys representing detainees said to the court at the hearing, backing up Ms. Le’s account to the court. You need to read it all. As a citizen, you need to know what is being done in your name. And when you’re done, you need to read the entire transcript of the hearing. And then you need to think about what you, personally, are willing to do about it.

First, I’d just like to revisit your question earlier of whether the unitary executive’s behavior in Operation Metro Surge has outpaced the system’s capacity to ensure that the Constitution is being complied with. And this is abundantly clear that the answer is yes. We see from this hearing today and from the abundant cases before this Court and the other judges in this district that attorneys are — they’re not being credentialed or properly trained or supervised, nor are officers or agents of respondents from supervisors on down, Mr. Easterwood on down. There are problems with supervision and training that have resulted in immense violence to our communities. That we hear that it is pulling teeth for counsel of record to get her own client to fix these constitutional violations. It should not be pulling teeth to get compliance from the Government with the Constitution.

In my book, Ms. Le, and Ms. Kelley, and the other attorneys who appeared before Judge Blackwell, are heroes. Ms. Le, of course, was quickly relieved from her temporary assignment with the Department of Justice, and may have completely lost her government job (at this writing, that is not known). But Ms. Le stood up, and for that, we are all grateful.