“This Job Sucks”: DOJ Attorney Asks Judge to Hold Her in Contempt

It’s rough working for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Minnesota these days. Many of the office’s lawyers and staff have quit over the Justice Department’s handling of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in the state, specifically the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. 

In federal court Tuesday, the stress apparently got to a lawyer volunteering to help the short-staffed office. 

Attorney Julie Le was representing the government at a hearing over ICE’s failure to follow court orders and immediately release people that it had wrongfully detained. When Judge Jerry Blackwell asked why the agency is not complying, Le said that the government was “overwhelmed” by the legal challenges to Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota, and that trying to get ICE to comply with court orders has required nonstop work for an office depleted by resignations. 

“I wish you would just hold me in contempt of court so I can get 24 hours of sleep,” Le said. “The system sucks, this job sucks, I am trying with every breath I have to get you what I need.” 

Blackwell said that he called the hearing to stress that ICE and other government agencies are not above the law.

“Some of this is of your own making because of non-compliance with orders,” Blackwell said.

Le normally doesn’t work for the U.S. Attorney’s Office. She used to work as an attorney for ICE in immigration court, and last month volunteered to help prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney’s Office deal with the many habeas petitions from immigrants in ICE detention seeking their release. But Le admitted to Blackwell that ICE is out of its depth, and was not prepared to argue cases in federal court. 

“We have no guidance or direction on what we need to do,” Le said.  

President Trump’s Minnesota crackdown has proceeded with little regard for the law, drawing a backlash from local residents who have scrambled to protest against the massive deployment of federal agents and their violent tactics. Since the deaths of Good and Pretti, those protests have only intensified, and Trump’s response has been to double down. The U.S. attorneys who haven’t quit in protest now have to deal with the legal fallout. 

A federal agent used his cell phone to take a picture of Marimar Martinez after she was shot five times by Border Patrol in Chicago—a chilling image that haunts her to this day.

Martinez testified in Congress Tuesday about how she was shot after she followed an agent’s car in Chicago while trying to warn her neighbors. DHS initially claimed that when the officers exited their vehicle, Martinez tried to run them over, “forcing the officers to fire defensively.” She was charged with felony assault of a federal officer despite ending up in the hospital herself.

In her testimony, Martinez revealed a new detail about what happened after she was shot.

“After being at the hospital for less than three hours, I was discharged from the hospital into custody of the FBI. As we left the hospital, I was escorted out through the back in a wheelchair. I observed over dozens of Border Patrol agents waiting outside the hospital,” Martinez said. “One of the agents came up to me with his cell phone and took a photograph of me. It was the same agent who had previously kept coming in and out [of my hospital] room, and I had to repeatedly tell him to leave. I told him I did not consent … but he did not care. It still haunts me that this agent has my photo on his phone. Was this the agent that shot me? Was this a trophy for him?”

Why did a federal agent keep coming into Martinez’s room while she lay in her hospital bed? And why did he have to take her picture if she had already been arrested, if not to keep a “trophy” for himself as Martinez suggested? Recall that Charles Exum, the agent who shot Martinez, bragged in text messages afterward, “I fired 5 rounds and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book, boys.”

While ICE has reportedly been scanning protesters’ faces, this instance feels much more personal.

Renee Good’s brother hoped her senseless killing at the hands of a federal agent would have brought an end to Donald Trump’s sweeping immigration enforcement crackdown. Instead, he hasn’t seen any change.

Addressing a public congressional meeting Tuesday to examine the violent tactics of Department of Homeland Security immigration enforcement agents, Luke Ganger spoke about his sister, who was the first U.S. citizen to be shot and killed by a federal agent in Minneapolis last month.

“In the last few weeks, our family took some consolation thinking that perhaps Nee’s death would bring about change in our country, and it has not,” he said.

“The completely surreal scenes taking place on the streets of Minneapolis are beyond explanation. This is not just a bad day or a rough week or isolated incidents. These encounters with federal agents are changing the community, and changing many lives, including ours, forever,” he said. “I still don’t know how to explain to my four-year-old what these agents are doing when we pass by.”

Ganger said his four-year-old daughter “knows that her aunt died and that somebody caused it to happen.”

“She told me that there are no bad people and that everyone makes mistakes. She has Nee’s spirit,” he said. His sister, he said, “carried peace, patience, and love for others wherever she went.”

“Our family is a very American blend,” Ganger continued. “We vote differently, and we rarely completely agree on the finer details of what it means to be a citizen of this country. We attend various churches, and some not at all. And despite those differences, we have always treated each other with love and respect. And we’ve gotten even closer during this very divided time in our country. And we hope that our family can be even a small example to others not to let political ideals divide us, to be good like Renee.

“But the most important thing we can do today is to help this panel and our country understand who Nee is, and what a beautiful American we have lost. A sister, a daughter, a mother, a partner, and a friend.”

Ganger’s call for unity bears repeating. Not a single Republican congressperson—the very same people who want you to believe that Good deserved to die—bothered to attend Tuesday’s forum.

Also testifying were Brent Ganger, another brother of Good; Marimar Martinez, who was shot five times by federal agents in Chicago; Aliya Rahman, who was violently detained by agents in Minneapolis while trying to go to the doctor; and Martin Daniel Rascon, who was shot at by Border Patrol in California while driving with his family.

The White House may have pulled the plug on U.S. participation in the World Health Organization, but that doesn’t mean that Americans have to.

The Illinois Department of Public Health sidestepped the federal government this week by independently joining the WHO’s Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN), the Chicago Tribune reported Tuesday. It is the second state to do so, after California joined the network last month.

Illinois officials said the decision was made in part to keep the state informed on the latest global health data.

“We knew this created serious concerns, really, in our effort as a big state in the United States to keep our awareness and [stay] alert about potential global outbreaks and how they could impact the residents here in the state of Illinois,” said Dr. Sameer Vohra, director of the Illinois Department of Public Health, during a press conference. “Part of that was the fear that we would lose access to the WHO’s global surveillance system, which would really let us know about early warnings of outbreaks.”

Vohra underscored that it was critical that Illinois remain up-to-date with accurate information about surging health threats around the world, citing the Marburg virus outbreak that appeared in Ethiopia last week.

“This provides the real-time information to us,” Vohra said of GOARN. “Instead of waiting for the federal government to relay that, if and when that might happen, we’ll get direct access to that network of information.”

The Trump administration completed the U.S. withdrawal from the WHO on January 22. In a statement, the Department of Health and Human Services claimed that the global public health entity had failed not only in its efforts to address the Covid-19 pandemic but also to reform itself in the years since.

Not a single Republican member of Congress showed up to the public forum held by Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal and Representative Robert Garcia on the violence inflicted by federal immigration agents, featuring testimony from the brothers of Renee Good, who was shot and killed by ICE agent Jonathan Ross in Minneapolis last month.

“With us in spirit are also Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti. In spirit. They should be here in person, but they were murdered. They were murdered by their own government. They were killed in cold blood,” Blumenthal said to open up the forum on Tuesday, before turning to Good’s brothers. “I can only imagine how painful it must be for you to see that image of your sister. Which speaks to your courage. Your guts. Your grit and determination to be here today.”

Also testifying were Marimar Martinez, who was shot five times by customs agents in Chicago; Aliya Rahman, who was violently detained by agents in Minneapolis while trying to go to the doctor; and Martin Daniel Rascon, who was shot at by Border Patrol in California while driving with his family.

Other Democrats who joined the hearing included Senators Amy Klobuchar, Dick Durbin, Adam Schiff, and Elizabeth Warren, as well as Representatives Yassamin Ansari, Shontel Brown, Jasmine Crockett, Summer Lee, Emily Randall, Melanie Stansbury, Suhas Subramanyam, and Rashida Tlaib.

This story has been updated.