The Trump administration’s surge in deportation operations has put an unprecedented strain on both communities and courts around the country. Alarming reports this month highlight in painstaking detail one added challenge federal courts are facing in managing the growing caseload of habeas cases: how widespread the administration’s defiance of court orders has become in immigration cases.
The strain has been particularly acute in Minnesota, where judges are managing the legal fallout of Operation Metro Surge, which began on Nov. 29 when the Trump administration started sending 3,000 immigration agents to Minneapolis. But orders issued last month by Chief Judge Patrick Schiltz of the District Court of Minnesota illustrate two powerful strategies to hold the Trump administration accountable for violating court orders: calling high-ranking government witnesses to testify about noncompliance, and shining an authoritative spotlight on the unprecedented number of court orders violated during this administration.
The case, Tobay Robles v. Noem, is one of the many habeas cases pending in the District of Minnesota. After lawyers for Juan Hugo Tobay Robles, a 43-year-old Ecuadoran man, notified the court that their client remained detained in violation of a court order for his release, Judge Schiltz scheduled a show cause hearing, an opportunity for the defendant, the Department of Homeland Security, to explain why it should not face penalties for the violation.
This was no routine scheduling notice. In a short but explosive order, the judge wrote that Tobay Robles’ case was “one of dozens of court orders with which respondents have failed to comply in recent weeks” and ordered Todd Lyons, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), to personally appear at the hearing three days later to “show cause why he should not be held in contempt of court for violating the Court’s January 14, 2026, order.” The order stipulated that the hearing would be cancelled, and Lyons’ appearance no longer required, if the plaintiff were released from government custody.
Within hours of the judge’s order, the government released Tobay Robles. And as promised, the court cancelled the show cause hearing.
The order cancelling the hearing was also anything but an ordinary case management order:
[A]s promised, the Court will cancel the hearing, and Lyons will not be required to appear.
That does not end the Court’s concerns, however. Attached to this order is an appendix that identifies 96 court orders that ICE has violated in 74 cases. The extent of ICE’s noncompliance is almost certainly substantially understated. This list is confined to orders issued since January 1, 2026, and the list was hurriedly compiled by extraordinarily busy judges. Undoubtedly, mistakes were made, and orders that should have appeared on this list were omitted.
This list should give pause to anyone—no matter his or her political beliefs—who cares about the rule of law. ICE has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence. The Court warns ICE that future noncompliance with court orders may result in future show‐cause orders requiring the personal appearances of Lyons or other government officials. ICE is not a law unto itself. ICE has every right to challenge the orders of this Court, but, like any litigant, ICE must follow those orders unless and until they are overturned or vacated.
It has been clear since long before this case that the Trump administration’s relationship with the federal courts—and especially its failure to comply with dozens of federal court orders in constitutional and Administration Procedure Act cases, as Just Security has documented—has been markedly different than past administrations. As analysis from POLITICO makes clear, Tobay Robles’ experience is sadly far from unique in individual immigration proceedings as well. However, holding the executive branch accountable for those violations has challenged litigators and courts alike, especially as the administration has weaponized legal arguments and procedures to avoid exposing their noncompliance.
But in Tobay Robles, Judge Schiltz and the District of Minnesota judges who worked together to compile the list of court order violations modeled two powerful forms of accountability for violations of court orders.
Calling Witnesses Forces Compliance
The first lesson is that this administration is afraid to allow its top officials to testify about court order defiance. Taking the stand would have required Lyons to testify under penalty of perjury, to subject himself to examination by opposing counsel or the presiding judge, and to be prepared to answer detailed factual questions about his and his agents’ actions. It is one thing to defy a court in the abstract and to hide behind the protective lawyering of the Department of Justice. It is another thing entirely to show up and defy a judge, and the constitutional judicial power they represent, to their face.
(It is worth noting that not all DOJ lawyers are willing to make excuses for defiant behavior. As Judge Schiltz noted in his show cause order, the assistant U.S. attorneys on the case “struggled mightily to ensure that respondents comply with court orders despite the fact that respondents have failed to provide them with adequate resources.” The civil division chief referenced by name in the order has since resigned.)
Judge Schiltz called the administration’s bluff that they would come in and have a defensible answer for their actions. And the administration blinked.
Requiring top officials to appear in court to testify looks like it is becoming a winning strategy for judges to force court order compliance. Before Tobay Robles, few judges had sought this kind of accountability, perhaps out of deference to the executive branch, a well-intentioned risk aversion to dealing with claims of executive privilege to excuse testimony, or the risk of politicized impeachment proceedings, like those against District of D.C. Judge James A. Boasberg, for addressing executive defiance.
But the few other judges who have ordered testimony from Trump officials have been able to use those orders to appear to answer questions about noncompliance or factual misrepresentations. In March 2025, Judge William Alsup of the Northern District of California scheduled a hearing in AFGE v. OPM, a case challenging Reduction in Force notices sent to thousands of federal employees, requiring the testimony of Acting Director of the Office of Personnel Management Charles Ezell. In support of the government’s opposition brief to plaintiffs’ motion for a preliminary injunction, Ezell filed a sworn declaration stating that he never ordered agencies to carry out the challenged mass firings. Judge Alsup made the judgment to require Ezell’s testimony directly.
Rather than defend its representations and produce Ezell for testimony, the government took the extraordinary step of filing a notice retracting his declaration entirely, and stating that they would not produce Ezell for testimony as he was no longer a relevant fact witness. With the administration’s main piece of evidence against injunctive relief retracted, Judge Alsup easily granted plaintiffs their requested preliminary relief. The administration would rather lose in court than put their officials on the stand.
These are only two data points, and perhaps there are alternative explanations. Lyons may have made the calculation to release one individual rather than travel to Minneapolis to testify. Ezell may have thought OMB could achieve its Reductions in Force through other means than fighting a preliminary injunction. Even so, Tobay Robles and AFGE v. OPM illustrate a promising strategy—whether letting officials testify is seen as a risk to the administration, or just inconvenient, the administration changed course in response to an order to testify.
So why have orders for officials to testify worked where other strategies have not? The answer likely lies in the few examples in which the administration has allowed officials to testify. It hasn’t gone well.
In Chicago Headline Club, a case challenging excessive and retaliatory use of force against protestors during Operation Midway Blitz, an ICE operation in Chicago, Judge Sara Ellis of the Northern District of Illinois received numerous notices from plaintiffs’ counsel that her temporary restraining order (TRO) blocking federal agents from using tear gas or other chemical munitions on protestors or journalists had been violated. (For full disclosure, colleagues of mine at Protect Democracy Project helped litigate the case.) In response, Judge Ellis ordered Gregory Bovino, the commander-at-large for Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), to testify about violations of the TRO. At an Oct. 28, 2025 hearing, Judge Ellis read Bovino the restrictions she had ordered his agents to follow and walked through several examples of his agents violating those restrictions. Bovino provided few answers to the questions Judge Ellis asked about the violations and often gave one-word responses.
Bovino’s subsequent court-ordered deposition, in which he was faced with numerous videos of violations of the TRO, fared no better. As just one notable example, Bovino was impeached with video evidence about an earlier claim that he deployed tear gas into a crowd only after being hit in the head with a rock, ultimately admitting that he was not hit until after he threw the tear gas. Judge Ellis concluded in a 233-page decision that “the Court specifically finds [Bovino’s] testimony not credible. Bovino appeared evasive over the three days of his deposition, either providing “cute responses to Plaintiffs’ counsel’s questions or outright lying.” Bovino’s disastrous testimony proved critical in obtaining a preliminary injunction against ICE tactics in Chicago. Though the injunction was stayed pending appeal and the case was voluntarily dismissed, Bovino and CBP left Chicago a few weeks later and quietly wrapped up Operation Midway Blitz.
A notable nuance here is that the administration does not seem to fear sending any federal employee into court—just certain high-level officials, and perhaps just those responsible for its most controversial actions. Career attorneys, for example, have been increasingly sent in to court to answer for the noncompliance of other federal agencies. To the contrary, the recent colloquy between District of Minnesota Judge Jerry Blackwell and a Special AUSA handling ICE cases paints a picture of line attorneys who are often not equipped, purposefully or otherwise, to answer questions about noncompliance, even as the heads of the noncompliant agency component avoids testifying. For similar reasons, while recent moves by judges in Minnesota and elsewhere to hold lower-level officials in contempt may be a necessary step toward accountability, it is unlikely to seriously dissuade the administration to address the systemic factors causing widespread violations of court orders, especially in cases involving DHS.
Communication is Key
The second strategy for accountability for court order defiance can be found in Judge Schiltz’s second order. By including an appendix of the staggering 96 violations of court orders in his district in January 2026 alone, Judge Schiltz performed a powerful service for the American public by exposing the depth of the court order defiance taking place across his state.
This strategy for accountability lies at the intersection of the power of the courts and the power of the people. As the apocryphal story of Andrew Jackson remarking that “[Chief Justice] John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it” teaches us, the constitutional reality is that a determined executive branch may make the political calculus to pick an inter-branch fight with the judiciary and simply defy orders it does not want to follow. The administration has flirted with this strategy in immigration cases like the Alien Enemies Act case, Abrego Garcia, and D.V.D. v. DHS.
But polling shows that the public strongly disapproves of the administration’s disregard of court orders. Key to generating public outrage is painting an authoritative, factual picture of noncompliance that the public cannot look away from. The public outcry in response to Abrego Garcia’s treatment, for example, which was viscerally captured in the campaign to raise awareness of his experience in El Salvador’s megaprison, was likely a significant factor in ultimately securing his release (and in securing compliance with the court order requiring facilitation of his release).
Judge Schiltz’s order is a novel way of using the unique power of the bench to communicate critical information to the American people. The public has followed the defiance of court orders in individual high-profile cases, but rarely is it given a sense of the volume of this administration’s lawlessness, especially related to immigration enforcement. That lack of public visibility comes at significant cost to both the rule of law and to the individuals who are detained despite an order supposedly guaranteeing their release. Highlighting the breadth of this administration’s defiance in the cases it thinks it can get away with has the power to remind the American people that the law is often on their side, even if this administration fails to respect it.
With the Trump administration likely to continue to pursue its goal of large-scale deportations, with all the widespread rights violations that has entailed to date, this moment is unlikely to be the last in which the courts are faced with the administration’s failure to comply with court orders. Judge Schiltz and his colleagues have demonstrated powerfully that the federal bench has both the power and the tactics to meet the moment.
