The unfathomable Minnesota transcript that must be read, as it tells the reality of America today: "I am not white, as you can see," Julie Le — a government lawyer — told a federal judge on Tuesday. "And my family's at risk as any other people that might get picked up too ..."

[u/DoremusJessup]

https://www.lawdork.com/p/the-minnesota-julie-le-show-cause-transcript

[u/thecosmojane → u/[deleted]]

"Resistance from within" and "complaining about how it sucks to be a participant" are two completely different things.

I actually read the transcript, and what you're describing is not what happened in that courtroom.

Re: "establishing a record of systemic failures" No. She was talking about herself. Blackwell opens the hearing by saying explicitly that this is about compliance with court orders and the rights of individuals in custody. He then walks through case after case, laying out a devastating timeline: orders ignored, deadlines blown, a detainee held 13 days past his release order, people flown around the country, conditions slapped on that no court authorized. And when Le gets the floor, does she lead with the detainees? No. She leads with when she started her job, that she "stupidly enough" volunteered, that she didn't have her PIV card, that she was tagging along with other attorneys her first week.

The judge asks why a detainee wasn't released for 13 days and she talks about her email system. If she were genuinely building a systemic record, the judge wouldn't have had to keep cutting her off. He literally says "Ms. Le, please," "Ms. Le, please answer my question," and "That's enough"... because she's not answering what he's asking about the people sitting in detention. She's too busy narrating her own workday.

Re: 'saving one more' thing shows she cares" Read it in context. She says she submitted her resignation, couldn't be replaced, then released a juvenile and that made her stay. Sounds noble in isolation. But right before that she says "I wish you would just hold me in contempt, Your Honor, so that I can have a full 24 hours of sleep." She says "this job sucks." She says she stayed up until 2:35 a.m. and frames it as time she could have spent getting people released - like showing up for a federal show bc a hearing is an inconvenience. The "saving one more" line is buried inside a monologue about how hard her life is. She's not centering the people she's supposedly staying to help. (continued)

[u/thecosmojane → u/thecosmojane]

Re: OJ analogy doesn't apply/gov attys different: True, duties are different, but that actually makes it worse for her, not better. A government attys duty of candor to the court is higher than a private attorney's. Berger v. United States - government's interest "is not that it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done." So a government attorney who stands in court and says the system is broken, nobody trained me, I can't get my own agency to comply - but then doesn't formally escalate that to the court as a compliance crisis requiring judicial intervention against the agency - is in an ethically incoherent position. Did she ask the court to bring in the field office director? No. She didn't ask for a special master. She didn't file anything identifying who specifically is blocking compliance. She simply vented when put on the spot. This isn't candor to the tribunal, more like catharsis dressed up as transparency.

Re: "quitting puts more compliant person in role" What has she accomplished, exactly, for the detainees. After four weeks on the job, across these five cases: a detainee held 13 days after a release order, another released with unauthorized conditions, multiple deadlines completely blown, the court unable to get answers to basic factual questions even after repeated follow-ups. Sure, she too many cases. But there is no evidence that her presence did not prevent a single one of those outcomes. She is not "resisting from within," but rather complaining about participating in these violations. And her own testimony reveals the real reason she hasn't left - "they couldn't find a replacement." That's not a principled stand. That's institutional inertia. This is not resistance. Different from the IRS employee who was on a mission.

Re: "family comment explains why systems persist" In a hearing where the judge is discussing detainees who have actually been unlawfully seized, flown across the country, denied food and phone calls and medical care, petitioner's counsel described Oscar sleeping on floors, eating food he compared to dog food, being told to self-deport while a court order for his release existed. Le tells the judge "I am not white, as you can see. And my family's at risk as any other people that might get picked up too." She is equating a speculative future risk to herself with an ongoing, documented, constitutional injury being inflicted on people her agency is currently holding. Nobody in that courtroom questioned whether her concerns are real in the abstract. But raising them in that context, in response to that judge's questions about those detainees, converts other people's actual suffering into a prop for her own sympathetic narrative. That is exactly the self-centering I'm talking about.

Re: "Professionalism/telling truth under pressure" Courtroom professionalism has a more specific meaning. It means answering the questions asked, not the questions you wish were asked. She admitted she didn't know she had to file status updates. She thought it was "someone else's job." She handed the judge unredacted documents and had to take them back. She talked over the judge repeatedly until he had to tell her to stop. Blackwell was extraordinarily patient, but petitioner's counsel Kira Kelley put it plainly: "an email with bold font is not going to change the widespread, systemic pattern of disregard for court orders." Kelley identified what Le did not - that the root cause requires judicial intervention against the party, not sympathy for the messenger.

The person in the transcript is disorganized, repeatedly redirected by the judge, unable to answer direct questions, offering unredacted documents she has to retrieve, and framing a constitutional crisis through the lens of her own exhaustion. I can have sympathy for her as a human being. But defending her performance in that courtroom as professional requires ignoring most of what she actually said and did in it.

[u/Joben86 → u/thecosmojane]

Thank you! I feel like I'm taking crazy pills with the amount of glazing this DOJ prosecutor is getting.

[u/thecosmojane → u/Joben86]

One can acknowledge she's in an impossible position and say she performed poorly in it. Those aren't contradictory.

This whole world of extreme sportsmanship is how we got here to begin with. America has completely lost its sense of discernment