Minnesota’s chief federal judge was prepared to hold the director of Donald Trump’s maligned Immigration and Customs Enforcement in contempt of court over what he called the agency’s “extraordinary” violations of court orders in the state.
Earlier this month, District Judge Patrick J. Schiltz gave ICE one week to hold a bond hearing for an Ecuadorian man identified in court documents as Juan T.R., or release him from custody. When the deadline came and went, Schiltz said the court’s “patience is at an end” and ordered Lyons to testify.
ICE released the man, and Schlitz called off the hearing. But the judge unleashed his frustrations over an agency at the center of an avalanche of lawsuits and other cases overwhelming federal courts in Minnesota and elsewhere.
The judge listed 96 court orders from 74 different cases that ICE allegedly failed to follow since the beginning of the year, a count that was “almost certainly substantially understated.”
“ICE is not a law unto itself,” he wrote Wednesday night. “ICE has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence.”
Federal courts in the state are swimming in cases alleging unlawful arrests and abusive and illegal use of force from immigrants and citizens alike swept up in the Trump administration’s mass deportation dragnet.
It’s not just in Minnesota. Judges across the ideological spectrum in courts across the country have spent months wrestling with high-profile lawsuits and cases that rarely if ever make headlines as thousands of immigrants challenge their arrest and detention.
ICE is also at the center of lawsuits alleging brutal and abusive conditions in its detention centers, while federal judges have described Homeland Security’s boots-on-the-ground operations as behavior that “shocks the conscience.”
Administration officials have rigorously defended the agency’s actions and appealed the rulings against them, broadly attacking them as the work of “activist” judges obstructing the president’s agenda.
“ICE has every right to challenge the orders of this court,” wrote Judge Schlitz, who clerked for the late conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and was appointed to the bench by Republican George W. Bush. “But, like any litigant, ICE must follow those orders unless and until they are overturned or vacated.”
The fact that he can come up with a list of 96 court orders that he says ICE has ignored within one month “should give pause to anyone — no matter his or her political beliefs — who cares about the rule of law,” he wrote.
Another Minnesota judge is threatening to hold ICE officials in contempt after the government failed to hold to return a Guatemalan immigrant back to the state after he was moved to a detention center in Texas.
Minnesota District Judge David Doty, an appointee of Ronald Reagan, said the man identified as Jose V. must be immediately released from custody if the government doesn’t hold a bond hearing — and officials must explain why they shouldn’t be held in contempt for failing to bring him back.
Another federal judge in the state said that the practice of “forum shopping” — or moving immigrants to states where courts may be more inclined to rule in the government’s favor — is “deeply concerning.”
ICE appears to be trying to “hide” detainees to make it more difficult for their lawyers to know where to find them to begin a legal challenge for their release, according to Bill Clinton-appointed Minnesota District Judge Donovan Frank.
A Somali woman who entered the United States as a refugee in 2024 appeared to have had a stroke after ICE arrested her earlier this month. ICE now wants to take her into custody when she’s released from the hospital.
Minnesota District Judge Paul Magnuson, another Reagan appointee, blocked ICE from re-arresting her this week, finding that she doesn’t need to be in ICE custody “for an extended and unspecified amount of time.”
Even Trump-appointed judges who have sided with the government in challenges against an immigrant’s arrest and detention have appeared to admit that their interpretation of the law is a painful one.
“It is a sorrowful conclusion to require an otherwise law-abiding man be detained and kept from his family,” North Dakota District Judge Daniel Traynor wrote Wednesday.
In a ruling from West Virginia that released a Venezuelan man from custody, Clinton-appointed Judge Joseph Goodwin noted that “seizures and detentions are occurring increasingly across the country,” and stressed that what’s happening in Minneapolis cannot be ignored.
“Individuals are stopped during ordinary civilian activity, taken into custody for civil immigration purposes, and confined in local jails without prompt hearings, without individualized findings, and often far from counsel, family, or community,” the judge wrote Wednesday.
“That broader context matters, especially when assessing constitutional risk,” he added. “Liberty is not a prize for procedural persistence. It is the baseline. That is why the court’s duty to scrutinize custody is more acute than ever, as liberty is administratively restrained. Every day it happens — outside the criminal process, in facilities designed for punishment, and lacking the ordinary safeguards that must accompany arrest and prosecution.”
The courts must “draw and hold clear lines in every case,” he added.
