700 ICE agents exit Twin Cities amid legal chaos

What happened

President Donald Trump and his border czar, Tom Homan, said Wednesday they were pulling 700 federal agents from Minnesota. But more than 2,000 agents will remain in the Minneapolis area, where two months of ICE operations have left the Twin Cities in an uproar, claimed the lives of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, prompted an exodus from the U.S. attorney’s office and opened a rift between Minnesota’s federal courts and the Trump administration.

The various fissures were highlighted on Tuesday when an ICE lawyer working for the Justice Department to process immigration cases told a federal judge her job “sucked” and it was like “pulling teeth” to get ICE to comply with court orders to release migrants from detention. The attorney, Julie Le, was then “fired from the U.S. attorney’s office,” The New York Times said. “It remained unclear whether she had also been fired from her job at ICE.”

Who said what

The Trump administration “says it launched its largest-ever immigration operation in Minneapolis in response to an unfolding welfare-fraud scandal,” The Wall Street Journal said. But the “four prosecutors who spearheaded” the Minnesota fraud case have “all left the U.S. attorney’s office” in recent days, CBS News said, “along with more than a dozen others in a growing wave of resignations.”

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Eight more federal prosecutors are “in the process of leaving” the U.S. attorney’s office, joining six who left in January, ABC News said. That office “has never lost 14 attorneys in the span of a single month before,” The Minnesota Star Tribune said. “Meanwhile, investigations into alleged fraudulent activity in Minnesota’s social services programs have stalled.” The DOJ has “sought to buttress Minnesota’s prosecutorial ranks” by poaching from other U.S. attorney’s offices, DHS and the military, CBS News said, but as Le’s outburst shows, “that has not always worked out well.”

What next?

Trump told reporters on Wednesday he had ordered the Minnesota drawdown, saying he had learned that “maybe we can use a little bit of a softer touch,” while still being “tough.” Homan said further de-escalation hinged on getting more access to county jails and “less rhetoric and hate” from protesters. The “unexpected degree of resistance from angry and organized locals,” captured “in countless social media videos, helped sour Trump on the operation,” the Journal said, “particularly after a barrage of negative coverage following Pretti’s killing.”