This is One Thing, I'm David Rind, and we know President Donald Trump's immigration enforcement crackdown has been felt on the streets and in politics, but it's also crushing the courts. We have had the equivalent of it.

Eight years worth of those habeas corpus cases come in.

Eight Years!

Eight years worth in two months.

Stick around.

I have proposed, and President Trump has concurred, that this surge operation concluded.

When White House Borders R. Tom Homan on Thursday came out and announced that Operation Metro Surge would be winding down, Minnesota leaders like Governor Tim Walz breathed a cautious sigh of relief.

Fact of the matter is they left us with deep damage, generational trauma, they left us with economic ruin in some cases, they left us many unanswered questions. Where are our children?

A lot of residents have those questions too. It's unclear what this drawdown will actually look like, how many agents will remain on the streets. And as we saw with the killings of Alex Preti and Renee Good, all it takes is one interaction gone wrong to create a crisis. It's also worth noting that even as Homan admitted, there were some issues that needed fixing, he said federal immigration enforcement would continue at scale.

President Trump made a promise of mass deportation and that's what this country is going to get.

But the impacts of this push have not only been felt by immigrants and local businesses, it's also being felt by the people who are trying to prosecute these cases in court.

We understand that at least six prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney's Office in Minnesota have quit, a source telling us it's because the Trump administration pressured them to focus the investigation on the actions of Renee Good's widow.

And at the same time, they're blocking the state from doing an investigation, because the FBI is blocking them from access to that evidence.

The government attorneys who are still on the job are being crushed by casework. Resources are being shifted. Federal judges have admonished ICE for not following orders. One judge said, "'ICE has likely violated more court orders in January, 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence.'" But is that defiance of court orders intentional or can you chuck it up to a lack of manpower? And what do those resignations say about the true priorities of the Trump Justice Department? Let's talk today to Doug Kelly. He was an assistant US attorney in Minnesota for seven years and remains plugged into what's going on in that office. So Doug, what is your sense of the workload that these attorneys are dealing with under this surge of immigration enforcement that the Trump administration is doing?

Well, first of all, the office is woefully understaffed right now. They have a compliment that they're authorized of about 70 lawyers. And, uh, they're down a lot after the most recent 14 that have hit the newspaper. And the case law, David has changed tremendously since the search.

Mm, how so?

So your listeners should know that if you are detained by ICE and taken to that Whipple Federal building, the only recourse you have is to get a lawyer to file a habeas corpus petition which means that basically I'm improperly being held. Since ICE started at the beginning of December, we have had the equivalent of eight years worth of those habeas corpus cases come in.

8 years!

Eight years worth in two months. Holy cow. Yeah. And so then as we talk about it, there are two parts of this. So those cases need to be talked about. And then on the other side, the office has swamped with agents, ICE agents who want to file assault cases against protesters. So you have a whole backlog of those. And I am told that on January 13th, which is the day the first six prosecutors resigned en masse, the combination of saying, we are not going to do a civil rights investigation of Jonathan Ross, who's the one who shot Rene Good. And then also, oh, by the way, we want to set up a satellite office out in the federal building, which is separate from where that U.S. Attorney's Offices just to process and put emphasis on bringing a lot of these cases against protesters. The combination of those two things, I think, are what caused that first group of six to say, no, thank you, this is not going in the right direction.

So you have undocumented immigrants who are saying, I was improperly detained. You have all those cases. Then you have cases from federal agents against protesters who allege they may have been assaulted, things like that. And we saw an ICE attorney in front of a federal judge, and there were quotes that came out from this transcript. Her name is Julie Lee. And she was basically saying, the job sucks. That was her quote, the system sucks, this job sucks, and I am trying every breath that I have so that I can get you what you need. The judge was basically like, why are you not complying with all these orders? She eventually left. I mean, what does that kind of back and forth from an attorney say to you about what's going on?

Well, I think it's a really good example of what's happening. So they're woefully understaffed and now they're hit. So this woman had volunteered to come over from being a nice immigration lawyer to come to the United States attorney's office. She already picked up in the first month, 90 cases that she was going to deal with. Um, and just as an aside here, the, the judge who she was in front of name is Jerry Blackwell. He's the one of the outside lawyers and he gave the final argument in the Derek Chauvin case and some five years ago, he became a federal judge.

The officer who killed George Floyd.

Yes, correct. And Judge Blackwell doesn't have a mean bone in his body, but he was trying to get to the bottom of. He has had five cases, as I understand it, where he had granted the habeas corpus petition and said these people are improperly detained, but nobody could tell them where they were and whether or not they were complying with his order.

'Well, yeah, so judges are kind of complaining about this non-compliance. CNN has reported how judges are threatening contempt charges against some of these cases because of the non-compliance. To you, is it a willful thing, or is it just that crushing caseload and just the pure amount of work that has to be done is the reason why some of these orders aren't being followed?

'Well, I think it's a combination, but I liken this to, you know, Rommel comes with his tanks to the front line to do his blitzkrieg, but doesn't put any gasoline in the backup lines in his lines of logistics. They should have known and should have planned that if they were going to have this surge in arrests in all these cases, um, and they should have provided the infrastructure to deal with it. And they did not. In Judge Blackwell's case, that means there were five people who were being held. Uh, in jail after a judge had said you should be out in, in the United States of America, that's not right. We're supposed to be beyond that. And also, David, the chief judge of Minnesota, who was the one who was threatening to hold people in contempt, he is a very rock-ribbed conservative. He was a Judge Scalia law clerk. He taught at Notre Dame Law School. He taught Amy Coney Barrett, which she was a student there. I mean, his conservative credentials are really not in question at all. And to have that kind of a person say, this is wrong, the rule of law that's falling down, I think is really alarming.

And we should say the DOJ says they are following court orders. A spokesperson said, quote, If rogue judges followed the law in adjudicating cases and respected the government's obligation to properly prepare cases, there wouldn't be an overwhelming, habeas caseload or concern over DHS following orders. So that kind of fits in a pattern of this administration blaming the judge.

Well, and as I said here, you have a former Supreme Court clerk for Antonin Scalia is the one they're calling a rogue judge. You know, that just doesn't fit.

We gotta step away, but when we come back, if the cases are gonna keep coming, who's gonna work them? Stick around. We heard today as we record this just on Thursday, just a few hours ago, that this Operation Metro Surge would be winding down. How long do you think it will take prosecutors to dig out of this backlog of cases? Or do you things will even get better at all just based on everything that's gone on?

'Well, even if the agents all left tomorrow, that the glut of these cases are still there and the court system is gonna have to figure it out. Now, what the United States Attorney's Office has done is they brought in people from Lawyers for Ice that come over. They have some JAG lawyers, some Judge Advocate General Military lawyers come in from D.C. And then they've tried to bring some people in from North and South Dakota, Wisconsin, and so forth to fill the gap. But it's just really hard to do that. And as the Ms. Lee example shows you, this is not just, lawyers aren't pungible. You need to be there, you need to have the experience of what's going on. And you should know also David that many in the bar here in Minnesota, many law firms and others are saying they're holding in-house seminars. And saying we need volunteers, we want people to come and we're gonna teach you some immigration law and we want you at pro bono to go represent these folks who have been unlawfully detained. A number of law firms have volunteered to do that. I'm quite proud of them by the way for doing that.

'Well, I mean, the manpower issue has gotten so bad that some officials have even taken to social media to try and recruit more bodies. For example, White House aide Stephen Miller reposted a message from former DOJ Chief of Staff Chad Mizell on X that read, quote, if you are a lawyer, are interested in being in AUSA and support President Trump and his anti-crime agenda, DM me. We need good prosecutors. I know Ms. L is not even in government anymore, but is that normal to be selectively reaching out to attorneys who would be supportive of a particular president's agenda?

That is a slap in the face to every former assistant United States attorney who has taken the oath. The oath is, I swear, to support the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America. And to have Stephen Miller, and what was a former deputy chief of staff in the Department of Justice, say that the very first thing you have to do, are you a supporter of President Trump? And if you are, you're a patriot now, come and do the job. To me and to all of us who have been government lawyers. As I said, that's really a slap in the face about what this job is about.

So do you think that would really, just by definition, kind of narrow the amount of people that might be willing to do that if the first message is you're gonna need to be a little partisan here?

Yes, I certainly do. I really do.

'How does that kind of factor into what the Department of Justice is kind of up to more broadly? Like, when you look at the failed indictments of the Democratic lawmakers who spoke about not following illegal orders or the Jerome Powell criminal investigation that seems to have not gone over super well politically, even amongst Republicans, it seems like the effort to go after Trump's political enemies is kindof hitting some roadblocks, yet Attorney General Pambani said just this week that this so-called weaponization working group is only going to be ramped up in the days ahead.

Yeah, and you know, right here in Minnesota, another example of that is after early on in the surge, when the governor and the mayor of Minneapolis and the Mayor of St. Paul and others stepped up and said this is wrong, so forth, what did they do? The Department of Justice issued a grand jury's criminal subpoena and you know, it's kind of like I was talking with other lawyers who were hired in that And I think Eric Holder, former attorney general of the United States said it well, when he said, what were they being investigated for? And he said felony disagreement. Um, there is no law that I can think of that these officials would have violated. And that was another red line that I think was crossed here in Minnesota.

So they came, they said, we want to resign, but we want to use our annual leave up until April, meaning they wanted the taxpayers to pay for them to go on vacation.

And by the way, when these people resign from the U.S. Attorney's Office in Minnesota for good conscience reasons.

Breaking news tonight i fired them all they're fired from

The next day, Pam Bondi fired them all and then tried to deprive them of any of their accrued paid time off or vacation time or whatever she could get her hands on and then slurred them.

Good riddance to the six that are gone, our great other prosecutors from around the country are coming in to protect the men and women of ICE.

'That's about as retaliatory as you can get for a lawyer who's really on in his or her career. So it's very mean-spirited, very retaliatory, and it is really sad to see that the rule of law is being threatened this way.

Are you supportive of those who say, I can't do this anymore, I have to resign, and the office is gonna be left to kind of pick up the pieces and keep going forward?

I am supportive of that and very interestingly enough, Joe Thompson, the lawyer who was the one who led the first resignation of the six, it just came out that he is now going to represent Don Lemon along with Abby Lowell. And I think you'll see a number of former assistants doing those kinds of things as Have a great week.

I mean, that puts him on the other side of the office he wants to work for. That's wild.

Yes, yeah. You may remember as well that a magistrate judge refused to sign the criminal complaint against Don Lemon saying he has First Amendment rights. Then they appealed that to the chief judge, Judge Schiltz, that we were just talking about. And then they appealled it to the Eighth Circuit and all of them said no. Then they turned around and went back and got a grand jury indictment. So I think there are a lot of people who are offended that that was an overstepping of the boundaries as well.

That it wasn't just that they were doing it. It's like they were persisting. They kept trying and trying and trying.

Yes, absolutely. And so it's so interesting that the grand jury in Washington, D.C. Has had the guts to do something which very few others have, and that is to return what we call a no bill. That means they will not allow the indictment to go forward. That's with Senator Kelly and the others that you mentioned. Right. The illegal. Yeah. So and with Comey and Letitia James and the same deal. So. I'm hoping that more grand juries will, you know, the original founding fathers really thought grand jurees were going to be an important part of the judicial system as sort of the last bulwark against the system that was coming against them, and it was their way to register their protests over what was happening. And now that thing that's been kind of dormant for a while is really cropping up very importantly.

Yeah, I was told for years and years that a green jury could indict a ham sandwich. Well, we've seen a couple sandwiches, so to speak, that have not stuck.

Exactly. Very unusual, but for those of us who watched this system and have watched it for a long time, really good development.

Well, Doug, thanks very much for the time. I really appreciate it. Hey, my pleasure. On Thursday, the DOJ hit another speed bump in their aggressive efforts to protect the Trump administration's agenda. House Speaker Mike Johnson broke with the Trump Administration to criticize Attorney General Pam Bondi. After photos revealed she had obtained a lawmaker's search history of the unredacted Jeffrey Epstein files. The images taken during a congressional hearing showed a list of files Democratic Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal had searched while reviewing the files. Jayapall said she was not aware she was being surveilled until CNN contacted her about it. Speaker Johnson called the tracking inappropriate. Republican Nancy Mace also spoke out against it. Democrat Jamie Raskin said he would be asking for an investigation into what he called an outrageous abuse of power. A department spokesperson said in a statement to CNN that, quote, DOJ has extended Congress the opportunity to review unredacted documents in the Epstein files. As a part of that review, DO J logs all searches made on its systems to protect against the release of victim information. That's all for us today. If you like the show, make sure you're following it. So a new episode of Poppin' Your Feet and that will come your way on Wednesday. I'll talk to you then.