Judge Orders ICE Chief to Show Up in Court After Ignoring Due Process

A federal judge in Minnesota is ordering the head of ICE to appear in court Friday to defend why his agency is ignoring court orders and the due process rights of countless detainees.

Bush appointed Chief Judge Patrick Schiltz on Monday called on acting director Todd Lyons to testify and threatened him with contempt, stating that, “the Court’s patience is at an end.”

Schlitz’s order came in the case of a man challenging his detention in Minnesota earlier this month. He was supposed to either be released or get a bond hearing a week after his January 14 detainment. By the 23rd, he hadn’t received either.

“The Court acknowledges that ordering the head of a federal agency to personally appear is an extraordinary step, but the extent of ICE’s violation of court orders is likewise extraordinary, and lesser measures have been tried and failed,” Schiltz wrote, noting that ICE had already ignored “dozens” of court orders.

Lyons and ICE have yet to respond.

“The practical consequence of respondents’ failure to comply has almost always been significant hardship to aliens (many of whom have lawfully lived and worked in the United States for years and done absolutely nothing wrong),” Schlitz said of Lyons and ICE. “The detention of an alien is extended, or an alien who should remain in Minnesota is flown to Texas, or an alien who has been flown to Texas is released there and told to figure out a way to get home.”

This story has been updated.

Following backlash to the murder of nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, President Trump held a two-hour meeting in the White House Monday evening with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. Noticeably absent was White House adviser Stephen Miller.

Noem reportedly requested the meeting, The New York Times reports, and it took place amid rumors that her job is in jeopardy along with that of Corey Lewandowski, her top aide and rumored boyfriend. Also attending the meeting were White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, press secretary Karoline Leavitt, and communications director Stephen Cheung. Miller, who oversees the Trump administration’s immigration policies, did not take part.

The meeting is a sign that the criticism of the administration over its actions in Minneapolis is beginning to get to Trump. As head of DHS, ICE is under Noem’s purview, and she has been the face of mass deportations as well as the violence committed by federal agents. Noem called Pretti a “domestic terrorist” over the weekend, although Leavitt tried to walk that statement back on Monday.

Miller called Pretti a “would-be assassin” following his killing, and Leavitt also refused to defend his comments. Meanwhile, Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino has been ordered to leave Minneapolis and return to his old job in California and DHS has suspended his social media accounts. Is Miller also going to be sidelined along with Noem?

The Trump administration is sending ICE agents to the Winter Olympics in Italy.

The Associated Press has reported that ICE will have a “security role” at the Milan games, and will apparently not conduct any immigration enforcement. This is a tall, high-profile task for an agency that shot and killed Renee Good in Minneapolis this month—and continues to wreak havoc in the city after federal agents killed Alex Pretti.

Giuseppe Sala, Milan’s mayor, offered a resounding rebuke of ICE’s upcoming presence in his city.

“This is a militia that kills, a militia that enters into the homes of people, signing their own permission slips,” Sala said on Italian radio shortly before ICE’s role was confirmed. “It is clear they are not welcome in Milan, without a doubt.”

Vice President JD Vance, his wife Usha, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio will be present at the opening ceremony on February 6.

The Trump administration pledged to deport violent criminals—but instead, some of them have been on the payrolls of the federal government’s most aggressive agencies.

ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection employed at least 30 people with sexual and violent criminal histories in recent years, according to a report published Monday by the Ohio Immigrant Alliance with research from the Pacific Antifascist Collective.

At least 20 of those individuals committed offenses with underage victims, according to the report.

The 30 listed individuals have been charged with a wide litany of crimes, including gunpoint sexual assault, child sex trafficking, aggravated assault, robbery, rape, torture, kidnapping, sexual abuse of a minor, and possession and production of child sexual abuse materials.

Their transgressions occurred between 2015 and 2025, with the bulk of abuse happening within the last two years.

The delinquent officers include Minnesota-based ICE agent Alexander Steven Back, who was arrested in November for allegedly soliciting sex from a minor, in a multiagency sting referred to as “Operation Creep.”

“When he was arrested, he said, ‘I’m ICE, boys,’” Bloomington Police Chief Booker Hodges told reporters at the time of Back’s capture.

Elsewhere in the state, in June, Homeland Security Investigations Special Agent Timothy Ryan Gregg “attempted, coerced, and enticed a minor victim” in order to make child pornography, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, District of Minnesota.

The majority of the listed offenders were located in Arizona, where at least nine agents committed sex crimes. Several of the offenders were charged, caught, or sentenced within the last year.

The most recently convicted officer within the folds of the Grand Canyon State was 30-year-old Aaron Thomas Mitchell, who was sentenced in March to 27 years in prison for kidnapping and raping a teenage girl.

Months later, in May, Yuma-based CBP agent Ramon Marquez was arrested and charged on multiple counts for abusing a 16-year-old participant in the state’s Customs and Border Protection Explorer Program.

Later that summer, another Arizona-based border agent, Bart Conrad Yager, was slammed with 24 felony charges, which included one count of attempted child sex trafficking and six counts related to his attempts to solicit prostitutes.

“There is a dangerous culture within these agencies, and that is evidenced by this horrifying list,” said Ohio Immigrant Alliance executive director Lynn Tramonte in a statement. “Congress must stop giving ICE and the Border Patrol a blank check to commit crimes against the public. DHS must answer for its faulty hiring, vetting, and re-verification processes. The public cannot trust law enforcement agencies that employ so many dangerous criminals, and refuse to police their own ranks.”

But the agencies’ seemingly endemic violence will likely only be exacerbated by the Trump administration’s slapdash recruitment tactics, which involve a “wartime recruitment” hiring spree that aims to take on as many as 10,000 new officers in the coming year. Part of that strategy includes spending millions on social media advertisements targeted at gun rights advocates, UFC enthusiasts, and manosphere podcast audiences.

Meanwhile, AI-induced slip-ups have “sent many new recruits into field offices without proper training,” according to law enforcement officials who spoke with NBC News last week.

Donald Trump’s administration is asking for permission to destroy evidence in its so-called investigation into the killing of Alex Pretti by Customs and Border Patrol agents.

The Trump administration filed a legal motion Monday opposing a federal judge’s order preventing it from tampering with evidence related to Pretti’s death, The New York Times reported. While it’s not uncommon for the Trump administration to oppose judges’ orders against it, this case seems particularly unnecessary—and suspicious.

U.S. District Judge Eric Tostrud issued an order Saturday barring federal agents from “destroying or altering evidence,” in response to a request from the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, or BCA. This order referred to evidence “removed from the scene” or evidence “taken into [the government’s] exclusive custody.”

In a signed declaration, BCA Superintendent Drew Evans said the Minneapolis Police Department had requested his agency’s presence at the scene but that when his agents arrived, Department of Homeland Security officers turned them away. DHS also did not respond to subsequent requests to access the scene.

“After the FBI cleared the scene without providing the BCA access, local and state law enforcement officers were unable to hold the scene, and it was overrun by individuals in the area,” Evans said. “The BCA was thus unable to examine the scene.”

The BCA has historically handled investigations into shootings involving federal law enforcement, and has typically done so without federal involvement, according to Evans.

Clearly, DHS is taking unprecedented actions to control the investigation into the second broad daylight killing of a civilian by its agents in just the past month. When coupled with Customs and Border Patrol’s efforts to shield its officers from accountability, and Trump officials’ desperation to change the subject, it seems we may be looking at a bona fide cover-up.

Meanwhile, what we know about Pretti’s senseless killing is limited to the footage captured by multiple eyewitnesses. Video from several angles of the incident showed that Pretti was tackled by multiple federal agents after he approached a protester who’d been pepper-sprayed. When the agents realized the man they’d beaten and pinned to the ground was armed, they took his gun, and two of the agents shot him roughly 10 times.

DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin confirmed Monday that the deadly incident was captured by body cameras worn by multiple DHS agents involved in the shooting. It’s not clear whether this footage will be released to the public.

Customs and Border Patrol boss Greg Bovino’s time in Minnesota appears to have come to a close.

The commander-at-large has overseen ICE and Border Patrol operations across the country, moving from city to city as the agencies violently scour neighborhoods to satisfy Homeland Security adviser Stephen Miller’s mandate to arrest upwards of 3,000 people per day.

But press secretary Karoline Leavitt revealed during a White House press briefing Monday that the Trump administration is shuffling Bovino elsewhere, apparently replacing him with border czar Tom Homan.

“Mr. Bovino is a wonderful man and he’s a great professional,” Leavitt said. “He is going to very much continue to lead Customs and Border Patrol throughout and across the country. Mr. Homan will be the main point of contact on the ground in Minneapolis.”

CNN reported just a few hours after Leavitt’s press briefing that Bovino and some CBP agents are expected to leave Minneapolis soon and return to their normal areas of work.

Bovino’s ousting from the North Star State appears to be a part of a larger restructuring in which the Trump administration is attempting to reinvent its approach to its immigration agenda.

Donald Trump announced Monday morning that he planned to send Homan to Minnesota “tonight” and work with Governor Tim Walz.

“I told Governor Walz that I would have Tom Homan call him, and that what we are looking for are any and all Criminals that they have in their possession,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “The Governor, very respectfully, understood that, and I will be speaking to him in the near future. He was happy that Tom Homan was going to Minnesota, and so am I!”

Republicans have balked at the national backlash to ICE’s violence in Minnesota, which so far has involved the senseless killing of two U.S. citizens just weeks apart.

In the aftermath of their deaths, thousands of Americans have taken to the streets in protest. Trump’s job score has nosedived; he currently has a net approval rating of -19 percent.

The country, by all means, appears fed up with the reality of Trump’s immigration agenda, which has thus far deported people from the U.S. without due process, ripped children from their parents, and ushered thousands of untrained ICE agents into cities and neighborhoods where they are not wanted.

A CBS News poll published days before the Saturday killing of Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse working with veterans in Minneapolis, found that 61 percent of surveyed Americans felt that ICE agents were “too tough” when stopping and detaining people.

Even Texas Governor and vocal Trump supporter Greg Abbott has taken issue with federal agents’ deadly shootings in Minneapolis, saying that ICE needs to “recalibrate.”

“In general, we need to have respect for law enforcement officers in the country. ICE, they are law enforcement officers,” Abbott said Monday morning on conservative radio host Mark Davis’s show. “So they, being the White House, need to recalibrate on what needs to be done to make sure that that respect is going to be re-instilled. And that’s not an easy task, especially under the current circumstances.”

He added that he believes the White House is “working on a game plan” to help federal agents “go about their job in a more structured way to make sure that they are going to be able to remove these people, but without causing all the kinds of problems and fighting in communities that they are experiencing right now.”

Even as Abbott refused to attack slain protester Alex Pretti like much of the Trump administration—White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller called Pretti a “domestic terrorist”—he still placed most of the blame on local leaders, specifically Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and Governor Tim Walz.

“Your responsibility, your duty, is to use your office to make sure that there’s going to be calm and order in your community, and that means tamping down the rhetoric, tamping down ... the anger that your local residents feel, and instead instill calm and order,” he said. “This is truly the problem in Minnesota. It’s more about the lack of leadership, and the lack of calming by the governor, by the mayor—and candidly, I think they want it that way.”

Still, it seems that the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti—both caught on video and both so clearly contrary to the Trump administration’s narrative of their domestic terrorism—are a red line for more on the right than they would admit.

The White House appears to be distancing itself from comments deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller made about Alex Pretti, the Minnesota nurse shot and killed by Border Patrol agents over the weekend.

Press secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked Monday about Miller’s comment on X immediately after the shooting, in which he summarized the incident as: “A would-be assassin tried to murder federal law enforcement and the official Democrat account sides with the terrorists.” Miller’s tweet was reposted by official administration accounts, including @TrumpWarRoom and @RapidResponse47.

NBC News’s Gabe Gutierrez asked Leavitt why Miller, a White House official, would jump to conclusions before an investigation.

“Well, look, this has obviously been a very fluid and fast-moving situation throughout the weekend. As for President Trump, whom I speak for, he has said that he wants to let the investigation continue and let the facts lead in this case,” Leavitt replied.

Leavitt went on to avoid defending Miller’s comments two more times. Mary Bruce, the White House correspondent for ABC News, pointed out that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem also called Pretti a domestic terrorist in addition to Miller, and asked if President Trump agreed with that assessment. Again, Leavitt deflected, saying that she hadn’t heard Trump describe Pretti “in that way.”

When Bruce asked if Trump was alarmed to hear top administration officials “describe Pretti in that way,” Leavitt ignored the question and moved on.

But the next reporter, Agence France-Presse’s Danny Kemp, then asked Leavitt, “Will Stephen Miller be apologizing to the family of Alex Pretti for calling him ‘an assassin’ trying to murder federal agents, despite the fact that, as you say, this is still under investigation?”

Leavitt pointedly didn’t answer his question.

“Again, this incident remains under investigation and nobody here at the White House, including the President of the United States, wants to see Americans hurt or killed and losing their lives in American streets,” the press secretary replied.

On three different occasions, Leavitt, a spokesperson for the president, refused to defend Miller, who has pushed for aggressive immigration enforcement and argued against backing down in the face of criticism, going against others in the administration according to The Wall Street Journal. Instead, as criticism begins to mount from Republicans both nationally and inside Minnesota, the president appears to be trying to avoid any negative labeling of Pretti. Miller’s perspective may be losing support from the White House as it inspires a national backlash.

In the wake of yet another citizen being shot and killed in broad daylight by Donald Trump’s roving militia, the White House is now attempting to deflect blame by accusing Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar of fraud.

Trump announced the so-called investigation on Truth Social Monday morning, claiming that there was no way the Democratic lawmaker could have so much money. “The DOJ and Congress are looking at ‘Congresswoman’ Illhan Omar, who left Somalia with NOTHING, and is now reportedly worth more than 44 Million Dollars,” he wrote. “Time will tell all.”

This accusation is coming from the same man who raked in at least $1.4 billion in the last year alone—at the American people’s expense.

Omar wasted no time in dismissing Trump’s desperate finger-pointing.

“Sorry, Trump, your support is collapsing and you’re panicking. Right on cue, you’re deflecting from your failures with lies and conspiracy theories about me. Years of ‘investigations’ have found nothing,” she wrote on X. “Get your goons out of Minnesota.”

Speaking at a White House press briefing later Monday, Karoline Leavitt doubled down on Trump’s baseless allegations.

“The president raised a good question over the weekend, with respect to Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, who now has a net worth within the millions, and one must ask themselves why and how is that possible? Is she connected to the fraud rings we’ve seen taking place within her state, and her own district?” the press secretary said. “It’s a question the American people are raising, and the president believes it’s one worth answering.”

Following the second deadly shooting by federal immigration officers just this month, the only question the American people are really asking is: When will you be out of a job, Karoline?

Leavitt also repeated Trump’s claim that the widespread backlash to ICE’s wanton violence in Minnesota was merely a “cover up” for fraud. This absurd allegation is yet another example of the Trump administration attempting to hijack the language that describes its own actions, as the apparent cover-up of the senseless killing of Alex Pretti by Customs and Border Patrol agents is already underway.

Attorney General Pam Bondi’s blackmail letter to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz after the killing of protester Alex Pretti may force the Trump administration to end its violent immigration crackdown in the state.

On Saturday, hours after Border Patrol agents shot and killed Pretti in the streets of Minneapolis, Bondi demanded that Minnesota Governor Tim Walz give the Trump administration full access to the state’s Medicaid and SNAP records so that her office could “efficiently investigate fraud.” Bondi also demanded Walz end the sanctuary state policy and hand over all state voter registration records to Trump. Walz refused.

Now a federal judge is weighing this letter as evidence that the administration is using the presence of armed federal agents as coercion to achieve policy goals.

“They are not letting the courts work this stuff out. What they’re trying to get in court ... they’re trying to get that same thing by putting 3,000 heavily armed agents on the streets of Minnesota,” lawyers representing the state argued in court Monday. “The president of the United States said in the middle of this chaos and violence in the streets … he said, ‘Minnesota, your day of retribution is here.’ That is crazy. How can that not violate legal sovereignty?”

Judge Katherine Menendez expressed her own concerns about the federal operation, noting that Bondi’s letter to Walz clearly detailed a policy-based exchange: fewer federal agents for concessions on MAGA policy.

“Is the executive trying to achieve a goal through force that it can’t achieve through the courts?” Menendez asked DOJ lawyers.

“Have no idea if this suit will be successful but would be objectively hilarious if the federal government lost because Trump made Bondi write a mean letter admitting that this was all extortion,” one user wrote on X.

The case, Minnesota v. Noem, is still pending.