The latest weapon in the Democrats’ war against ICE and the enforcement of immigration laws is judicial contempt of court filings, including cash fines and threats of imprisonment for government employees as they inevitably fall short of the impossible and contradictory demands of federal judges and the “immigration bar.”
I’ve documented the practice before in conjunction with the overuse of the habeas corpus petitions. Private lawyers file such petition to gain the freedom from ICE custody of their illegal alien clients. These initial petitions enjoy an almost 100 percent success rate.
We are closing in on 1,000 habeas petitions filed in Minnesota in 2026 so far. The website Minnesota Reformer reports,
Most of the petitions were filed by a newly mobilized army of volunteer lawyers with little or no experience with immigration law.
They are corporate litigators, divorce lawyers, estate planners and criminal defense attorneys who are leveraging their bar admission to mount an unprecedented defense of immigrants.
“Little or no experience with immigration law.” Hold on to that thought.
Not surprisingly, the odds flip on the back end: illegal immigrants almost always end up doported anyway: either they are in the U.S. with authorization or they aren’t. There third way “illegal with an excuse” no longer flies.
The plaintiff’s attorneys either take the detainees’ money or some NGO’s money and buy some time for their clients, but they are only postponing the inevitable.
In an effort to even the odds, plaintiffs attorneys are trying to win by default through disqualifying the opposition via contempt filings.
As it happens, there is a contempt filing scheduled for Monday morning in U.S. District Court in St. Paul before Judge Donovan Frank (Clinton appointee). The plaintiff, Alfredo Ramirez Isiordia, was released from ICE custody some weeks ago, but apparently without his work permit document.
Assuming for the sake of argument that such a document exists (or ever existed) and that ICE is in possession of it, reuniting the alien and his possession should have been a simple matter of an email, text, phone call, or video conference.
Instead, Judge Frank has gone nuclear, at the apparent insistnce of plaintiff’s counsel, scheduling an “emergency” contempt hearing to sort out this minor bureaucratic snafu.
Sorry for including all the qualifiers in the above description. Except for judge’s orders, all of the underlying documents in the case are hidden from the view of the general public.
These contempt hearings have already succeeded in driving at least two lawyers out of the local U.S. Attorney’s office, which seems to be the primary point of the exercise.
Media gleefully report every departure. From Newsweek.
Judge Warns DOJ Lawyers Don’t Have Proper Training for Immigration Cases.
First of all, as a matter of law, immigration cases should not be in federal district court to begin with. It is the judge who is in need of remedial education. Newsweek reports, quoting Judge Laura M. Provinzino (Biden appointee) of the U.S. Minnesota District Court
But it has become painfully clear over the past several months that the attorneys working on immigration habeas cases lack the basis resources and, in some cases, training necessary to comply with judicial orders.
To repeat, none of these cases should be in federal district court. The judge seems entirely unbothered by the complete lack of experience on the other side of the dispute.
Regardless, I watched the entirety of Judge Provinzino’s two-hour, rant-filled, video hearing over some already released detainee’s missing ID card. He got his card back the next day, via overnight mail, but not before the judge imposed daily cash fines and contempt filings over (and I repeat) a missing ID card.
As Charles Dickens warned in his courtroom novel Bleak House (1853), “Suffer any wrong that can be done you, rather than come here!”
