Le said that the government was “overwhelmed” by the legal challenges to Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota, and that trying to get ICE to comply with court orders has required nonstop work for an office depleted by resignations. 

Exactly the child rapist's intent.

Le normally doesn’t work for the U.S. Attorney’s Office. She used to work as an attorney for ICE in immigration court, and last month volunteered to help prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney’s Office deal with the many habeas petitions from immigrants in ICE detention seeking their release.

Maybe don't work for a criminal organization and volunteer for more?

Blackwell said that he called the hearing to stress that ICE and other government agencies are not above the law.

They're not? Could have fooled me.

Sucks to be on the sucky side

Good

Update: the government fired the attorney the next day, so she can at least get some sleep.

(The judge declined to grant her request for contempt.)

Even fascists need rest.

I feel for her. The best way to explain this situation to a layperson would be a teacher (the attorney) trying to manage a class of unruly students (ICE) whose parents (Trump) have the administration (Congress) kowtowing to their will.

This is FAKE News! If she DIDNT want to Defend People who FINGER BLAST CHILDREN Before auctioning them to Rich Men she would have Resigned!

So quit the job or quit your bitching. You're working for fascists and deserve to suffer by doing it.

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.

We have no guidance or direction on what we need to do,

Wrong. You have plenty of guidance. It's called "the law" and you went to school to learn how to understand it. If your people get instructions to violate the law, the instructions are invalid.

This is not complicated.

I actually feel really sorry for the career attorneys who make the representations in court on the political apparatus’ behalf,

Don't, they are 100% part of the problem.

Seems like this attorney is making it easy for the judge: rule against the government!