Property lost during immigration crackdown in Minnesota tees up latest showdown court contempt threats

By Devan Cole, CNN

(CNN) — When Judge Jeffrey Bryan took the bench Tuesday at his courtroom in downtown St. Paul, Minnesota, he had serious questions for the Trump administration: What happened to the personal property of some two dozen immigrant detainees, and why shouldn’t officials be held in contempt as a way of ensuring those items get returned?

The queries set off a lengthy and at times contentious hearing during which Bryan, an appointee of then-President Joe Biden, repeatedly sparred with the top federal prosecutor in Minnesota, in what has become the latest flashpoint in a fraught relationship between federal judges in the North Star State and administration officials.

The tension began during President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown there earlier this year and continued as courts in recent weeks have identified repeated violations of their orders in cases brought by immigrants challenging their arrest and detention.

Many of those immigrants were ordered released after judges, including Bryan, concluded that they were being held unlawfully. But as they were processed in and out of detention facilities, noncitizens in some two dozen cases before Bryan lost cash, phones, clothing and critical documents such as passports, work permits and driver’s licenses.

Almost immediately after the hearing got underway, Bryan and Daniel Rosen, the US Attorney for the District of Minnesota, whom the judge summoned for the proceeding, found themselves locked in a war of words. Rosen, a Trump appointee, accused the judge of “smearing” him and one of his deputies by warning that they may be held accountable for contemptuous behavior.

But the stakes were quickly raised when Bryan, concerned by the possibility that Rosen would bow out of the hearing altogether, floated the possibility of imprisonment to compel his participation in the proceeding. That form of contempt is separate from the civil contempt the judge is weighing to ensure belongings are returned to the immigrants.

“I haven’t ruled out the consequence of imprisonment,” Bryan said. “Although I’ll be honest with you, sir, I think that that’s very, very unlikely.”

Making such a decision, the judge said, “would a historical low point for the office of the United States Attorney and for this District.”

The hearing ultimately continued and over the course of several hours, Rosen and attorneys for some of the immigrants informed Bryan that in recent days many of the possessions had been located and returned to the immigrants. Those resolutions had the effect of removing the threat of civil contempt, a prospective measure intended to force compliance with a court order.

The orders at issue were handed down when Bryan directed officials to release an immigrant detainee. The judge’s release order included a standard provision requiring officials with Immigration and Customs Enforcement to also return all property taken from the immigrant while they were held in custody.

As the hearing unfolded, it became clear that in three cases, unreturned property was working its way back to its owners, but that in two instances, the government had outright lost belongings. Those lost items include a woman’s driver’s license and a man’s car keys, cell phone and earphones.

“We take very seriously the fact that it’s lost. Property shouldn’t be lost, but property did get lost,” Rosen told Bryan as he argued that officials made good faith attempts to locate the property and that any further efforts to find the stuff would be “futile.”

“I think these fall into the realm of human error. Human error for which the petitioner is entitled to compensation,” he said, adding later: “There was no contempt of court. Not in one single order. There was no defiance, no disobedience, and that’s what’s required for contempt.”

Bryan did not make a decision from the bench and said he may want to receive additional legal arguments in the matter before ruling.

Other contempt threats still loom

Elsewhere in Minnesota and across the US, other judges have similarly grown increasingly impatient with repeated violations of orders in immigration cases they’re handling, with some raising the possibility of future criminal contempt proceedings to punish the government should more defiance arise.

Last month, the US Attorney’s Office in Newark, New Jersey, told an appointee of Biden that a sprawling internal review undertaken at the judge’s behest found more than 50 instances of violations of court orders across hundreds of immigration cases brought in the state since early December.

Responding to the finding on Monday, US District Judge Michael Farbiarz said he was sympathetic to the office’s assertion that the failures were largely accidental, but he chided ICE for what he described as an apparent indifference to the violations, which included moving immigrant detainees out of the state even after a court order said they must be kept there while they challenged their arrest and detention.

“The problem is on ICE’s side of the line,” Farbiarz wrote in a 21-page ruling. “In response to the court’s order as to going-forward compliance measures, nothing came back from ICE. Nothing about how it might improve its internal processes. Or its training. Or its supervision. Or how it might bring more resources to bear.”

The judge said that moving forward, in all immigration cases where he ordered ICE to refrain, at least temporarily, from moving a migrant out of his district, he would also require sworn statements to be filed by the Justice Department attorneys in the case and officials from ICE that confirm receipt of his order and that the agency received legal advice on how to comply with it.

“Requiring declarations is intrusive,” he wrote. But, the judge added, “it is less intrusive than an alternative way to achieve (compliance) – further steps down the road toward a possible criminal contempt proceeding.”

Michael Z. Goldman, an attorney for an Indian national whose challenge to his detention set off the internal review ordered by Farbiarz, said his demand for declarations “clearly indicates that his patience is running thin, especially with ICE.”

The judge, Goldman said, “is giving the government ample opportunity to self-police itself before he applies more coercive measures.”

And in West Virginia, a federal judge ripped into the government over the weekend for continuing to detain non-citizens who do not have a criminal record despite opinions from judges in his judicial district that “repeatedly rejected legal arguments” pushed by the administration’s lawyers in cases challenging such detentions.

The judge, Joseph Goodwin, said that if “systematic violations continue despite repeated judicial findings of unconstitutionality, this court will employ the full range of its inherent authority, including … contempt proceedings against officials who defy this court’s orders or constitutional rulings.”

“Continued detention without individualized custody determinations, after this court’s repeated holdings that such detention violates the Fifth Amendment, will result in legal consequences,” Goodwin, an appointee of then-President Bill Clinton wrote in the ruling.

But nowhere has the issue of non-compliance — and the threats of contempt — been more acute than in the Twin Cities, where Trump’s Operation Metro Surge resulted in the federal courts there being inundated with cases brought by immigrants contesting their detention.

The challenges strained the government’s legal resources on the ground there, leading to the pattern of non-compliance that quickly gave way to a sustained tension between the federal judges in the state and the executive branch.

Patrick Schiltz, the chief judge of the state’s trial-level court who has been especially outspoken about the government’s approach to the crackdown and the legal wrangling stemming from it, made clear last week that his patience with ICE had run dry.

“The court is not aware of another occasion in the history of the United States in which a federal court has had to threaten contempt — again and again and again — to force the United States government to comply with court orders,” he wrote in a withering order.

“This court will continue to do whatever is required to protect the rule of law, including, if necessary, moving to the use of criminal contempt,” added Schiltz, an appointee of former President George W. Bush. “One way or another, ICE will comply with this court’s orders.”

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