Lawyers for the Department of Justice are crashing out. The Dow, the Dow right now is over, the Dow is over $50,000. I don't know why you're laughing. You're a great- Not Pam Bondi, that's a separate issue. No, the lawyers tasked with prosecuting immigration cases for the Trump administration are quitting, saying they have too much work. One DOJ lawyer in Minnesota got a lot of attention last week when she told a judge, quote, this job sucks. A former DOJ chief of staff tweeted in desperation. If you're interested in being an assistant U.S. attorney, DM me. To which someone replied, your DMs aren't open. When President Trump sent ICE into Minneapolis to run amok, his administration was bound to get sued. A bunch. The problem is, he's running out of lawyers. That's coming up on Today Explained. Support for this show comes from the Working Forest Initiative. The working forest industry is committed to planting more trees than they harvest. 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Power your business with the platform trusted by millions today. This is Today Explained. Kyle Chaney is a senior legal affairs reporter for Politico who's been reporting on a ruling from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. It's a federal court that was handed down late last week. And the court said what exactly, Kyle? So for months, the Trump administration has been mounting this aggressive, not just a mass deportation effort, but a mass detention effort where anyone they want to deport, Even if these are people applying for asylum or seeking other legal pathways to remain in the United States, they're locking them up, essentially, in a way that no previous administration ever has. And the way they're doing that is reinterpreting old laws and trying to apply them in a different way. Up until now, only recent border crossers were really subject to mandatory detention. Then came the second Trump administration, now implementing this mandatory detention policy, saying that with very few exceptions, when a migrant is apprehended in these ICE enforcement operations, the government is compelled to detain them without bond as they fight their deportation. And courts around the country have been rejecting this over and over hundreds and hundreds of times. However, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, a very conservative panel of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, ruled on Friday that the administration's interpretation of those old laws was correct and that they could continue this mass detention campaign on top of their mass deportation campaign. What was the Fifth Circuit's reasoning here? So it's somewhat nuanced and complicated, but the idea is whether you treat people who have lived in the United States maybe for decades, no criminal records, people who have built lives here, you can treat them as though they have just arrived in the country. Essentially call them arriving aliens is the term in the law. And again, no previous administration has interpreted it this way, but it is a convoluted aspect of these old laws. And, you know, then the Fifth Circuit said that what this administration is doing may be different, but just because they're exercising power in a different way doesn't mean it's wrong and they backed them up. OK, so the Trump administration says we're going to interpret this law differently. Do we do we know how the Trump administration landed on the notion that they could interpret the law differently? I don't know necessarily how the deliberations played out, but they did implement this through. it's very discreet. It was a July 8th policy memo from ICE's acting director, Todd Lyons, that basically said, you know, the old way is wrong. We're doing it a new way. And since that day, we've seen this slow explosion of these cases. And now it's not slow anymore. It's all over the country. Every state is seeing these detention cases. We're seeing thousands of cases in court. These are people who are being grabbed under this new policy and saying that's illegal. You can't do that. So it's been building. And now with Minnesota being the center of this deportation effort, we're seeing a ton of cases come out of there. I see maybe 300 new cases a day around the country. And that's a big uptick from what it used to be, where it was, you know, 40 or 50 of those prior to the, you know, July memo from the ICE. All right. And you said that other judges had previously rejected the Trump administration's interpretation of these laws until they hit the Fifth Circuit. You reviewed some of the comments from those other judges. What do they argue here? What they say is, number one, it would be kind of shocking if for 30 years, every other administration had this power to mass detain people and didn't realize it. That would be a little unusual for people not to have known that. If Congress had authorized this mass detention strategy, maybe they would have been a little more explicit about it than some sort of nuanced reinterpretation of ambiguous language in an old law. And so that's what they point to. And they say, look, someone who's lived in the United States for decades is not an arriving alien. Just the plain meaning, a common sense reading of that. They also point to a Supreme Court ruling from a few years ago that kind of endorsed this divide between arriving and people who are crossing the border and can be detained in a mandatory way. You know, one of the most pointed responses we saw was from the judge who opposed the Fifth Circuit's view. She was the minority judge on this three judge panel that ruled. Her name is Dana Douglas. She said, you know, sort of memorable line, she said, straining at a gnat, the majority swallows a camel. And what I think she's saying there is by sort of parsing this sort of minutiae, this sort of confusing verbiage to sort of justify the administration's view of mass detention. They've opened up this sort of Pandora's box that's going to lead to untold consequences for the country and for a lot of people that maybe they didn't intend to unleash. All right. So this was a ruling by the Fifth Circuit, which means it does not apply to the whole country? Right. The Fifth Circuit covers Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi. The important caveat to that though is enormous number of these cases are coming out in Texas because even when people are arrested in Minnesota ICE is flying them sometimes very quickly to Texas where they have a lot of detention facilities and also they have a more favorable judiciary And so that somewhat by design And so there are a number of places and some judges have already said we reject the Fifth Circuit ruling you know where we where we are because we not bound by the Fifth Circuit decision And so that will affect a lot of cases. But a huge number of them do come through Texas. At a certain point, does this become a national law? I guess it would have to hit the Supreme Court, right? Right. And I do just expect that it will land there. I mean, number one, you know, not just the Fifth Circuit. I mean, this again, these cases have been playing out everywhere, thousands of them. And what I've seen is, you know, I've counted it more than 3000 times. Judges have rejected the administration's view of this policy. And that includes, you know, many judges appointed by Donald Trump himself. I think the number is something like 370 judges have opposed this to only 27 who have sided with the administration on this policy. So the balance now that that numbers game doesn't tell you everything. If the circuit rules, the circuit rules and it kind of overshadows the lower court rulings. But the prevailing consensus view of the legal world, the judicial world, is that the administration's gotten it wrong. And I suspect that will show up in other circuits. And that with the Supreme Court will say, look, if the courts are divided all over the country on this, we have to take it up. We know that some Americans are sort of horrified by the way that this has been playing out. We also know that there are Americans who are supportive of what the Trump administration is doing. One thing I've noticed that seems to bother Americans across the spectrum is stories of American citizens getting caught up in the immigration crackdown. It seems I could be wrong. It seems like that is avoidable. And yet, you know, you hear these horror stories. Why is this happening? So it is happening. What do you mean an overstate? An overstate. I don't know what that is. Where were you born? I'm from California. Don't lie to me. Where were you born? California. Okay, so we're going to take you in and verify your information. No, you're not, dude. No, you're not. And I told him I was an American citizen. And he looked at his other partner, like, you know, smiling, like saying, can you believe this guy? I asked when I would be able to speak to a lawyer. They never let me. They never told me what I was charged for. they just kind of threw me in there and didn't care. And, you know, I think the more frequently that it happens, the more it shines a pretty striking light on the mass deportation strategy overall. I think it's because we've seen the courts bless, the Supreme Court in particular, bless this notion that race can be a factor in the way, you know, and accent and language can be a factor in the way immigration officers do deportation stops, detention stops, arrests, to, you know, at least make an inquiry about someone's status. And a lot of times, if they don't get a satisfactory answer, someone can be arrested, they might have, you know, documentation, maybe it's not with them, maybe they're not gonna walk around carrying papers, if you're a US citizen, it hasn't been something we've had to do for them or think about for the most part. Now, it's becoming more of a reality where people are getting swept up because of the, again, the sort of roving, sweeping effort to detain so many people, you know, that it's very easy. The notion that someone could get swept up as a U.S. citizen is very easy. And then proving that, especially in a scenario where we just talked about where immigration courts are denying bond, denying even a chance to prove yourself, that could become very complicated if you're a citizen. Say, hey, I'm a citizen. And they say, well, we can't give you a bond hearing. Well, that's the nightmare scenario. Where do you think all of this is headed? Well, certainly the Supreme Court. Just in terms of, you know, the most practical sense of that word is I think the Supreme Court's going to have to decide, is this mass detention strategy viable? Is it a legitimate interpretation of the law? And then if they say yes, that does sort of reorient the way we view due process in this country, because it is, you know, again, immigrants, people who are charged with sort of deportable, you know, in a civil sense, they're being told they can be deported, have typically had, you know, multiple ways to sort of prove that they should be able to stay here, whether it's through asylum or through other, forms of legal status. And this sort of flips it on its head and makes the process so onerous and so punitive that a lot of people may just give up and not even bother with it, which is, I think, part of the strategy by the administration. Kyle Cheney, he covers legal affairs for Politico. Coming up, why so many Department of Justice lawyers are crashing out. Support for Today Explained comes from Vanta. Business owners know, says Vanta, that the landscape is changing. Risk and regulation are rising. Customers expect proof of security before they even consider signing. 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They say their clothes are designed for layering and mixing, helping you build a timeless wardrobe made to last. Timeless how? How about a trench coat, a classic pair of jeans, or one of those super soft Mongolian cashmere sweaters? According to Quince, each Quince piece is made to last with premium materials in ethical, trusted factories, then priced far below what other luxury brands charge. Our colleague Claire White has gotten into some Quince. I recently picked up a few more pieces of the Mongolian cashmere collection from Quince, the fisherman sweater and a cardigan. I love both of these pieces, not only because the quality is amazing, but because the price point is truly unbeatable. I know these will last in my closet for seasons to come, and they've kept me so warm and so fashionable since I received them. Refresh your wardrobe with Quince. Go to quince.com slash explain for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns now available in canada too that's q u i n c e.com slash explain to get free shipping and 365 day returns quince slash explain support for this show comes from found if you a small business owner wrangling your finances can feel like an ongoing struggle You might be anxious about your taxes or stuck chasing receipts and invoices all while toggling between multiple disconnected apps. And at the end of the day, that time could be better spent on your customers. But Found says they can help you finally get a hold on your business finances, and all from a convenient place. Found can help you eliminate your finance clutter by giving you one platform that handles it all, including banking, bookkeeping, invoices, and taxes. That means no more paying for multiple subscriptions or dealing with clunky, outdated apps. Plus, Found says they want to help make tax season a little less stressful by automating things like tracking expenses and finding write-offs. You can take back control of your business today. You can open a Found account for free at found.com. That's F-O-U-N-D dot com. Found is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services are provided by Lead Bank, member FDIC. You can join the hundreds of thousands who have already streamed their finances with Found. Oh, yay. Oh, yay. Oh, yay. Oh, yay. This is Today Explained. I'm Ian Millhiser. I cover the Supreme Court here for Vox. You recently wrote about a Department of Justice lawyer named Julie Lee, who, as I understand it, looked a federal judge in the eye and said, this job sucks. What happened? Yeah, she said more than that. At one point, she said that, like, sometimes she wants the judge to hold her in contempt so she can get a night's sleep. So, yeah, what happened here is that Lee was an attorney for the Department of Homeland Security. She volunteered to take an assignment with the U.S. Attorney's Office in Minneapolis, which is handling this enormous crush of cases caused by the ICE occupation of Minneapolis. And the workload they gave her was just insane, completely unmanageable by any one attorney. She apparently was assigned to 88 cases in a single month. And, you know, that incredible workload was placed on one lawyer turns out to be a microcosm for a lot of the dysfunction that is happening in Minneapolis. 88 cases. How many cases a month is normal? Do you know? So the short answer is it depends on the complexity of the case. I've known lawyers who would spend months and months preparing for one trial, although that would be a very complex trial. I look for professional guidelines on this, and the professional guidelines say that prosecutors generally shouldn't be assigned more than 150 cases in a year. And this woman was assigned 88 cases in a month. Oh, okay. Yeah, so that's about six or seven times more work. She was doing the work of about a half a dozen lawyers. And explain what Julie Lee's job is and what she said she was struggling to get done. Yeah, so this is like somewhat counterintuitive. But like, it turns out one of the reasons why immigrants are being treated so poorly in Minneapolis is because there aren't enough prosecutors. And like, normally you don't think of prosecutors as being a good thing for people who are being locked up. Right. But what's happening is a lot of these immigrants are being detained illegally. Judges are issuing orders saying, no, no, no, no, no, you have to you have to release this person. There's one judge who complained that there are more than 90 court orders that the Trump administration has defied. This month, the court has found ICE has violated 96 court orders in 74 cases. ICE has likely violated more court orders this month than some federal agencies have in their entire existence. And it looks like a huge reason for that is that the Trump administration, like they surged law enforcement officers. At its peak, there were 3,000 law enforcement officers that the federal government sent to Minneapolis. But they didn't send lawyers. They didn't send, you know, additional clerical staff in the detention facilities. And so what happens is a judge issues an order saying, hey, you need to release this person. They're being detained illegally. And normally that order would be sent to the lawyer. The lawyer would notify the detention facility of it. The detention facility would tell the guards, hey, you got to turn the key and let this person go. And the process would get underway. But because they surged the capacity to arrest people without adding additional personnel for all the legal compliance things that go into something like a massive occupation of a U.S. city, judges are issuing orders to release people and those orders are not being followed. OK, so ICE is not following court orders because it sounds like in your telling they can't. They don't actually have the manpower to do it. What happens when the government cannot comply with court orders? I guess let me first answer what happens when someone other than the government defies a court order. Cool. And the answer is that you are held in contempt if you really, really defiant. And then there could be all sorts of legal consequences. You can be fined if you are held in contempt. You could be thrown in jail if you are held in contempt. But those contempt orders are enforced by the Department of Justice. It's the U.S. Marshals Service, which is an arm of the Department of Justice, that will come and take you to jail if a judge orders you jailed if you're thrown in contempt. So there's sort of this standoff going right now where you've got the Trump administration is violating all kinds of court orders. You know, as I said, like one judge counted more than 90 court orders that are that are being violated. You know, in theory, like a judge could order the head of ICE thrown in jail. But is the Justice Department actually going to enforce this order? So there's a bit of a harrowing dance going on right now where judges are trying to pressure the Trump administration to comply. And in some cases that succeeded. There was one judge who got someone released because he ordered the director of ICE to show up in court and explain himself. And that was enough to get ICE to say, OK, we'll release that one person. But at some point, I think, you know, these judges have to worry about if they push as hard as they would push against a private litigant, is the Justice Department at some point going to throw up both of its middle fingers and say, well, we're just not going to enforce that order? All right. So perhaps unsurprisingly, Julie Lee was fired after her outburst. She is no longer working for the Justice Department I don know that I know the specific circumstances of why but she is she no longer there We wish her well but she is not the only person leaving the DOJ You reported on what we can, I think, call a mass resignation in the Minnesota U.S. Attorney's Office. What is happening there that prosecutors are leaving? Yeah. So it appears that there's several layers of things going on here. So the New York Times recently reported U.S. attorney's offices throughout the country have lost about 14 percent of their lawyers since Trump took over. A lot of that seems to be the fact that, you know, people just don't want to be doing the things that this administration is asking them to do. That's been particularly concentrated in Minnesota. So there's ordinarily about 70 lawyers in the U.S. attorney's office in Minnesota. The U.S. attorney prosecuting the massive Minnesota fraud investigation has resigned. The New York Times reporting five others have also stepped away. A federal law enforcement source says the resignations were triggered in part by pressure from DOJ leadership to investigate Good and her widow's connections to activist groups. At least eight other lawyers, it has been reported, walked since then. And that's on top of the attrition that I already described, where, you know, lawyers were already leaving these Justice Department jobs. The U.S. attorney for Minnesota now admits that his office does not have enough staff to deal with the explosion of civil litigation, all generated during Operation Metro Surge. U.S. Attorney for Minnesota Daniel Rosen filed this new declaration in federal court, saying, quote, paralegals are continuously working overtime. Lawyers are continuously working overtime. All this is happening while the civil division is down 50 percent. It's gotten so bad that like former Justice Department personnel have been, you know, Trump appointees have been tweeting like, hey, we need a USA's. Please DM me if you want to work for the Justice Department. Which first of all, is it how like DOJ is considered an elite employer? Normally, they do not struggle to find very, very, very qualified job applicants. But beyond that, like on top of that, apparently the Justice Department is applying an ideological screen where now they are asking people who want to be prosecutors. You know, do you support Donald Trump's agenda? How will you help implement like which executive orders are you excited about? Yeah. And like there's two problems wrapped up. One is that, like, if you setting, I mean, we'll set aside, like, the fact that the DOJ isn't supposed to be politicized in that way. If you limit the universe of your applicants to MAGA lawyers, then you're going to get worse lawyers because it's just a smaller pool. Is the administration trying to fill the hole? Like, you said people are tweeting, please come work for us. But do you see a concerted effort on the part of the administration at the highest level to, like, get these positions filled? I think that they are trying to do triage. So like Bloomberg reported that I think 93 U.S. attorneys offices in the United States, they were each ordered to designate one or two lawyers apiece will be part of what are called jump teams that I guess will go to areas like Minneapolis where they have a huge amount of need and try to support the lawyers there. There's also reports that military lawyers, JAG attorneys are being deployed to Minneapolis in order to try to pick up some of the slack there. And I mean, again, like setting aside the questions of like whether it's a good idea to have military lawyers doing civilian law enforcement and stuff like that. There's all kinds of problems with this. I mean, if you're taking lawyers out of U.S. attorney's offices elsewhere in the country, those lawyers are doing important work. You know, we want heroin dealers and terrorists and bank robbers and other people who commit federal crimes to be prosecuted. And if you are being surged to Minneapolis to deal with a bunch of cases brought by illegally detained immigrants, you're not doing the other important work that the Justice Department does. What are the longer term implications here? How does this ripple out a year from now, three years from now, five years from now? So I think this is going to be a disaster for the government in the long term for several reasons. I mean, I think back to when I was a young lawyer and like you think very, very hard about what jobs you want to take because you're especially when you're early career, you're establishing your reputation. And if you get attached to a bad employer early in your career, that can have repercussions that carry you forever. think about what happened to julie lee like every single potential employer who wants to hire now is probably going to google her name and what's going to come up is going to be a bunch of news articles about the time when she told a federal judge that she wanted to be held contempt of court and like the reason that happened is because she was put in this untenable position by her employer where she was given such an unmanageable workload that the employer set her up for judicial sanctions. I'm not going to go work for that employer. And no sensible lawyer is going to is going to want to go work for an employer who's going to do it for them because that that could be career cancer. And if you look at what happened to Julie Lee, if you look at what's going on with these jump teams and all these lawyers having been surged to all these places because the workload is so intense. If I'm a lawyer who has the option of going to a private law firm and making a whole lot more money than I would make at the Justice Department, you know, I might be willing to take the Justice Department salary if I know, well, I'm going to have a more reliable workload. I'm going to have job security. I'm going to see my kids more often. Like there's a lot of attractive things about this federal job, but the Justice Department can't promise that anymore. And that It means it's going to struggle to hire people or it's going to have to raise its salaries significantly if it wants to be able to compete for the very, very high caliber of talent that it has historically been able to hire. Ian Millhiser, he covers the law for Vox. Hadi Mawagdi produced today's show. Amina El-Sadi edited, Patrick Boyd engineered, and Dustin DeSoto and Andrea Lopez-Gruzado checked the facts. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. Thank you.
