Minnesota ICE Surge Has Pushed the U.S. Federal Court System to the Breaking Point

A massive immigration enforcement operation run by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Minnesota has pushed the nation’s federal court system to the brink of total breakdown.

Since Operation Metro Surge launched in December 2024, federal immigration agents have arrested roughly 4,000 people, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The surge has triggered an avalanche of new lawsuits in Minnesota’s federal district court, all filed on behalf of detainees challenging their imprisonment by ICE agents. A WIRED analysis of court records and official judicial data shows Minnesota alone has seen nearly as many habeas corpus petitions—the legal filings challenging unlawful detention—as the entire country saw in a full 12-month period just last year.

The tidal wave of new federal court cases across Minnesota and other U.S. states stems directly from two policy changes enacted by the Trump administration: a historic expansion of the immigrant detention population and the elimination of a core legal process that previously allowed many detainees to secure release while their immigration cases proceeded. The outcome has been a court system on the verge of collapse: judges, private immigration attorneys, and federal prosecutors are all completely overwhelmed by the caseload, while detainees remain locked up, often held in facilities thousands of miles from their homes—even in many cases after a judge has already ordered their release.

“I’ve never said the word habeas so many times in my life,” said Graham Ojala-Barbour, a Minnesota immigration attorney with more than a decade of practice experience. Ojala-Barbour added that even when he goes to sleep at night, his dreams revolve around habeas petitions.

Widespread burnout is universal across every side of this caseload. On February 3, Julie Le, then a special assistant U.S. attorney in Minnesota, publicly begged a federal judge to hold her in contempt of court so she could finally stop working and rest. Data pulled from PACER, the federal government’s public court records database, shows Le was listed as counsel of record on 88 separate habeas cases. Daniel Rosen, Minnesota’s top federal prosecutor and head of Le’s office, had previously warned the judge in a letter that his team was “struggling to keep up with the immense volume” of petitions, and that at least one court order requiring the release of a detainee had fallen through the cracks. Le did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment, and the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office sent an automated reply to inquiries stating it currently has no public information officer on staff. Multiple reports confirm Le was fired shortly after that February hearing, where she told the judge outright, “This job sucks.”

In response to a request for comment, DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said, “The Trump administration is more than prepared to handle the legal caseload necessary to deliver President Trump’s deportation agenda for the American people.”

While the workload is grueling for federal prosecutors, the situation facing detained immigrants is far more urgent and dangerous. Court filings from detainees describe being crammed into cells so overcrowded that many couldn’t even sit down before being transferred by plane to remote detention centers in Texas. One detainee reported being forced to share a cell with multiple people infected with COVID-19, and others said ICE agents repeatedly pressured them and fellow detainees to agree to self-deportation.

In response to these claims, McLaughlin told WIRED, “All detainees are provided with proper meals, water, medical treatment, and have opportunities to communicate with their family members and lawyers. All detainees receive full due process.”

Ana Voss, former civil division chief for the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office, was listed as defense counsel for the federal government in nearly every habeas petition filed in Minnesota after Operation Metro Surge launched. Before December 2024, the vast majority of Voss’s caseload focused on unrelated matters, such as Social Security and disability claims. Since the operation began, immigrant detainee habeas petitions have completely overtaken all other work on her docket.

A WIRED review of PACER data found that in January 2025, 584 out of the 618 new cases Voss appeared in were categorized as detainee habeas petitions—a figure that is almost certainly an undercount, due to widespread incorrect “nature of suit” labeling in court records. Voss is no longer employed by the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office, according to an automated reply from her Department of Justice email account.

The explosion in habeas filings is not limited to Minnesota. Data collected by the legal tracking project Habeas Dockets shows that in the Western District of Texas alone, at least 774 petitions were filed in January 2025. That same month, 186 petitions were filed in Georgia’s Middle District. ProPublica has reported that more than 18,000 habeas cases have been filed across the country since January 2025.

For context, the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts reported that between April 2024 and the end of March 2025, only 618 total habeas petitions for noncitizen detainees were filed in the entire federal court system.

Multiple attorneys who have represented both the federal government and immigrant detainees point to two core factors driving the historic surge in habeas cases.

The first is simply that there are far more immigrants in detention than at any other point in U.S. history. The most recent available data from Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) shows that as of January 25, more than 70,000 immigrants were being held in ICE detention. By comparison, the total detainee population was fewer than 15,000 at the end of the Biden administration. Sarah Wilson, an attorney who previously worked in the Justice Department’s Office of Immigration Litigation, explains that increases in habeas petitions consistently track with growth in the detainee population.

The Trump administration has also enacted a new interpretation of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) that breaks from decades of established case law, expanding the categories of people who can be detained without access to parole. Previously, undocumented immigrants who had lived in the U.S. for several years were typically granted a bond hearing before an immigration judge. Those judges were required to weigh the facts of a detainee’s case, including their criminal history and risk of flight, to rule on release while their immigration cases were pending.

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That process no longer exists. Wilson says that today, filing a habeas petition “really has become the only avenue for restoring that right to a bond hearing that had previously existed.”

McLaughlin told WIRED, “It should come as no surprise that more habeas petitions are being filed by illegal aliens—especially after many activist judges have attempted to thwart President Trump from fulfilling the American people's mandate for mass deportations.”

On February 6, the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the Trump administration’s new legal interpretation of the INA. That ruling threatens to complicate many detainees’ path to a bond hearing, because the majority of detainees from the current surge are held in Texas, which falls under the Fifth Circuit’s jurisdiction.

Ojala-Barbour, the Minnesota immigration attorney, notes that habeas petitions are required to be filed in the federal district where a detainee is currently held. WIRED identified more than two dozen habeas cases originally filed in Minnesota that have since been transferred to other courts. In at least two of those cases, the federal government argued that the case should be moved to a Texas court because the petitioner had been transferred to a detention facility there. McLaughlin noted that ICE makes custody placement decisions based on available bed space.

Even with the Fifth Circuit’s pro-administration ruling, hundreds of cases in other federal jurisdictions have resulted in rulings rejecting the government’s new legal position. The chief judge of Georgia’s Middle District has even labeled the volume of incoming petitions an “administrative judicial emergency.”

Beyond just defending the government in habeas cases, federal prosecutors are also required to ensure the government complies with all court rulings stemming from those cases—including orders to release detainees and return them to their home states. When overstretched, understaffed teams miss these deadlines or fail to enforce court orders, detainees remain behind bars far longer than the law requires.

At a February hearing focused on the government’s noncompliance with release orders in five separate cases, U.S. District Judge Jerry Blackwell said, “When court orders are not followed, it's not just the Court's authority that is at issue. It is the rights of individuals in custody and the integrity of the constitutional system itself.”

Le, the former special assistant U.S. attorney, told the judge she had volunteered to help the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office handle the habeas surge, but described a chaotic onboarding process that left her completely unprepared to handle the dozens of cases assigned to her. Le admitted to the court she never received proper orientation or training, and had to learn how to handle the work entirely on her own. She told the court she worked for a full month before she received her employee security badge, and still struggled to access her work email weeks after starting. Court records also confirm she was added to active cases before she was formally admitted to practice law in Minnesota, requiring other attorneys to file court briefs on her behalf.

Before joining the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Le worked at ICE’s Office of the Principal Legal Advisor (OPLA). The difference between working as an OPLA attorney and a federal prosecutor in a U.S. Attorney’s Office can hardly be overstated: OPLA attorneys represent DHS before immigration judges at the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review, not federal judges, who belong to a separate branch of government. Immigration court proceedings are considered less formal, internal administrative processes where government attorneys receive broad deference, while legal experts note that the standards for evidence and procedure in federal court are far stricter.

Le told the judge that even when she did understand her duties, forcing ICE to comply with federal court release orders was like pulling teeth.

Today, Le is no longer with the U.S. Attorney’s Office, and Voss has also departed. Voss’s out-of-office automated reply lists David Fuller as the new point of contact for civil division inquiries. Since February, Fuller has been added to incoming habeas cases in the same pattern that overwhelmed Voss before her departure. As of February 10, PACER data lists Fuller as counsel of record in 183 habeas petitions filed in February 2025—double the number of cases he appeared in that were filed during all of January.

Additional reporting by Matt Giles