Trump’s administration is publicly feuding with itself.
A spokesperson for Kristi Noem’s Department of Homeland Security blasted government attorney Juliet Le on Wednesday, after Le told a federal judge that her job “sucked” and begged to be held in contempt. Le made the statements during a hearing to address why ICE officials were ignoring court orders to release detainees.
DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin minimized Le’s role in a statement to NOTUS, calling Le a “probationary attorney.”
“This conduct is unprofessional and unbecoming of an ICE attorney in abandoning her obligation to act with commitment, dedication, and zeal to the interests of the United States government,” McLaughlin added.
McLaughlin, 31, also confirmed that Le has been fired. Le’s comments quickly circulated after a journalist attending the Minnesota hearing reported on them.
“The system sucks. This job sucks,” said Le, who was on loan to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Minnesota from DHS. “I wish you could hold me in contempt so that I could get 24 hours of sleep. I work days and night just because people are still in there.”
Le, 47, and an assistant U.S. prosecutor had been called before Judge Jerry Blackwell on Tuesday to explain why ICE continued to detain five immigrants whose release Blackwell had previously ordered.
At times visibly emotional, Le said that convincing ICE officials to follow federal court orders was like “pulling teeth.”
She was pulled from her U.S. Attorney’s office detail following her comments, a Department of Justice official confirmed to the Daily Beast.
Government attorneys take an oath to defend the U.S. Constitution. They are bound by legal ethics rules requiring them to follow the law, and respect and uphold the legal system.
The Daily Beast has reached out to Le and DHS for comment.
Le previously worked as an attorney representing ICE in immigration court and had volunteered starting in early January to help the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Minnesota respond to hundreds of habeas corpus petitions stemming from President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement operation in the state, according to a hearing transcript obtained by NOTUS.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Minnesota has lost more than a dozen attorneys over the past month due to concerns about how the DOJ is handling the operation, including the department’s failure to investigate the killings of U.S. citizens Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti at the hands of federal agents.
At the same time, it has been hit by a flood of wrongful detention cases. The Trump administration is enforcing a mandatory detention policy for detainees, despite judges striking down the rule in more than 1,600 cases, Politico reported last month.
Le was personally assigned 88 cases in less than a month, NBC News reported.
She told the court that when she began, she had “no guidance or direction,” despite the fact that her normal job was in immigration court, not a federal district court, which follows a completely different set of rules and procedures.
She said she had requested a transfer back to DHS, but no one else was willing to do the job, so she stayed on to try to release more people. She told Blackwell that she shared his concerns about court orders not being followed.
“I am not white, as you can see, and my family’s at risk as any other people that might get picked up too, so I share the same concern, and I took that concern to heart,” Le said. Politico reports that Le was born in Vietnam and immigrated to the US in 1993.
“Fixing a system, a broken system, I don’t have a magic button to do it,” she continued to the judge. “I don’t have the power or the voice to do it. I only can do it within the ability and the capacity that I have.”
In a statement, a spokesperson for Pam Bondi’s DOJ blamed federal judges for the chaotic situation Le described.
“If rogue judges followed the law in adjudicating cases and respected the Government’s obligation to properly prepare cases, there wouldn’t be an ‘overwhelming’ habeas caseload or concern over DHS following orders,” the DOJ’s statement said.
