https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/04/us/politics/prosecutor-immigration-outburst.html
A federal prosecutor in Minneapolis was fired from the U.S. attorney’s office on Wednesday after she expressed exasperation with the crippling case load arising from the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration crackdown, according to three people familiar with the matter.
In an extraordinary outburst, the prosecutor, Julie T. Le, told a judge during a hearing on Tuesday in Federal District Court in St. Paul that she and her colleagues in the local U.S. attorney’s office were completely overwhelmed by the number of cases they had been forced to handle because of the White House’s widespread immigration sweeps in Minnesota. At one point, she sardonically told the judge that she would welcome being held in contempt of court because it would allow her to get a good night’s sleep.
Ms. Le’s painfully personal remarks came as the judge, Jerry W. Blackwell, was grilling her about why she and other prosecutors had ignored his orders in five separate cases to free immigrants he had determined were illegally detained by federal agents.
“What do you want me to do?” Ms. Le asked the judge at one point. “The system sucks. This job sucks. And I am trying every breath that I have so that I can get you what you need.”