How deportation broke the courts

Summary

Today, Explained — "How deportation broke the courts"

Date: February 12, 2026
Host: Noel King (Vox)
Guests: Kyle Cheney (Politico Senior Legal Affairs Reporter), Ian Millhiser (Vox Supreme Court Reporter)
Main Theme:
How the Trump administration’s mass deportation and detention efforts have overwhelmed the federal court system, leading to sweeping policy reinterpretations, legal chaos, and mass resignations within the Department of Justice.

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Episode Overview

This episode investigates the Trump administration's aggressive approach to immigration enforcement — specifically, the mass detention and deportation campaign — and how it has triggered a crisis of capacity and legality in the federal court system. Journalists Kyle Cheney and Ian Millhiser detail the controversial reinterpretation of immigration law, a recent pivotal ruling by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, the mounting legal pushback (including from judges appointed by Trump), and the catastrophic staffing crisis in the Department of Justice that now threatens due process and the careers of government lawyers.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Shift in Immigration Enforcement

(02:16 – 04:08)

• Kyle Cheney explains that the Trump administration has reinterpreted old immigration laws to justify mass detention, not just deportation. This reinterpretation, formalized in a July 8 ICE memo, allows law enforcement to treat long-term residents as "arriving aliens," subjecting them to mandatory detention.
• Previously, only recent border crossers faced such rigid detention rules. The Trump administration’s approach is unprecedented in scope and legal theory.

“The way they’re doing that is reinterpreting old laws and trying to apply them in a different way.”
— Kyle Cheney (02:16)

2. Legal Pushback and the Fifth Circuit Ruling

(04:53 – 07:56)

• Most courts have repeatedly rejected the administration's interpretation. Cheney notes that more than 3,000 times, judges have ruled against this reading, including hundreds of Trump appointees. Yet, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the administration’s approach.
• Judge Dana Douglas (the dissenting voice) memorably summarized her opposition:

  “Straining at a gnat, the majority swallows a camel.” (05:05)

• While geographically limited (Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi), the Fifth Circuit's jurisdiction is pivotal because many detainees are flown to Texas, amplifying the impact. Still, circuits are split, making Supreme Court review likely.

3. Unintended Consequences: U.S. Citizens Detained

(07:56 – 10:06)

• The mass, indiscriminate approach has led to U.S. citizens being wrongly swept up in ICE raids. Kyle Cheney highlights how immigration agents, empowered by courts' acquiescence to using race, language, or accent as factors, sometimes detain American citizens with inadequate legal recourse.
• The process to prove citizenship can be arduous, especially under rules that deny bond or hearings, creating “nightmare scenarios.”

“The notion that someone could get swept up as a US Citizen is very easy. And then proving that, especially...where courts are denying bond...that could become very complicated.”
— Kyle Cheney (09:36)

4. Breakdown in Legal Infrastructure

(15:09 – 25:06)

• Ian Millhiser recounts the story of Julie Lee, a DOJ lawyer in Minneapolis who told a judge, “this job sucks,” and confessed to wishing she’d be held in contempt to get some rest.
• Lee was assigned 88 cases in a single month — far exceeding professional guidelines (150 per year is typical). Such overwhelming workloads prevent timely compliance with court orders, leading to mass illegal detentions and government violation of nearly 100 court orders in a single month.

“She was doing the work of about a half a dozen lawyers.”
— Ian Millhiser (16:52)

• The inability to process releases means judges’ orders go unheeded, not due to malice, but sheer lack of capacity.
• ICE’s legal arm is so depleted that judges worry about the government simply ignoring the rule of law.

“There's a bit of a harrowing dance...judges are trying to pressure the Trump administration to comply. At some point...is the Justice Department at some point gonna throw up both of its middle fingers and say, 'well, we're just not gonna enforce that order.’”
— Ian Millhiser (20:26)

5. DOJ Staffing Crisis and Politicization

(21:00 – 25:06)

• The DOJ is hemorrhaging lawyers: a 14% loss nationwide since Trump's return, with the crisis acute in Minnesota. Resignations are triggered by unmanageable workloads and resistance to the administration’s agenda.
• Formerly elite positions now recruit openly on social media. Additionally, new hires must pass ideological screenings.
• To fill gaps, “jump teams” of prosecutors and even military JAG lawyers are deployed to overwhelmed districts, which compromises federal prosecutions elsewhere.

“If you limit the universe of your applicants to MAGA lawyers, then you're going to get worse lawyers because it's just a smaller pool.”
— Ian Millhiser (23:32)

6. Long-Term Implications for Government and Legal Institutions

(25:13 – 27:24)

• Millhiser warns that institutional damage could last years. Talented young lawyers will shun DOJ jobs — once seen as prestigious — fearing association with “career cancer” due to dysfunction, burnout, and public controversy.

“I'm not going to go work for that employer. And no sensible lawyer is going to want to...that could be career cancer.”
— Ian Millhiser (26:34)

• The choice to politicize and overload the DOJ not only erodes due process for immigrants but risks leaving the federal government chronically understaffed and less capable for years to come.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the legal rationale for mass detention:

  “It would be kind of shocking if for 30 years, every other administration had this power to mass detain people and didn’t realize it.”
  — Kyle Cheney (05:05)

• Judge Dana Douglas, dissenting at the Fifth Circuit:

  “Straining at a gnat, the majority swallows a camel.”
  — (05:05)

• On the magnitude of rejected cases:

  “I’ve counted it more than 3,000 times judges have rejected the administration’s view of this policy. The number is something like 370 judges have opposed this to only 27 who have sided with the administration.”
  — Kyle Cheney (07:09)

• On U.S. citizens caught up in raids:

  “Now it’s becoming more of a reality where people are getting swept up because of...the sort of roving, sweeping effort to detain so many people, that...someone could get swept up as a U.S. citizen is very easy.”
  — Kyle Cheney (09:36)

• Julie Lee, DOJ lawyer, overwhelmed:

  “Sometimes she wants the judge to hold her in contempt so she can get a night’s sleep.”
  — Ian Millhiser (15:27)

• On DOJ attrition and politicization:

  “Normally, DOJ does not struggle to find very, very, very qualified job applicants. But...apparently the Justice Department is applying an ideological screen—do you support Donald Trump’s agenda?”
  — Ian Millhiser (22:41)

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Important Timestamps

• 02:16 – 04:08: Trump administration’s reinterpretation of detention laws.
• 04:53 – 07:56: Court pushback and the Fifth Circuit’s ruling.
• 07:56 – 10:06: U.S. citizens mistakenly detained; due process crisis.
• 15:09 – 19:09: Story of Julie Lee and the workload breakdown.
• 21:00 – 25:06: DOJ resignations, recruitment crisis, and new hiring filters.
• 25:13 – 27:24: Long-term risks for the government and legal system.

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Conclusion

The episode paints a dire portrait of strained legal systems, inflexible and punitive policy shifts, human collateral damage including U.S. citizens, and a federal workforce facing massive burnout and institutional decay. The Trump administration’s approach to mass detention is described as one that not only "breaks the courts," but threatens both the rule of law and the capacity of American government for years to come.

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This summary captures the substance and tone of the original conversation, attributing key arguments and memorable phrasing to the original speakers.

Transcript

[Noel King]

Lawyers for the Department of Justice are crashing out the Dow. The Dow right now is over. The dow is over $50,000. I don't know why you're laughing. You're a great Not Pam Bondi. That's a separate issue. No, the lawyers tasked with prosecuting immigration cases for the Trump administration are quitting, saying they have too much work. One DOJ lawyer in Minnesota got a lot of attention last week when she told a judge, quote, this job sucks. A former DOJ chief of staff tweeted in desperation, if you're interested, being an.

[Ian Millhiser]

Assistant U.S. attorney, DM me.

[Noel King]

To which someone replied, Your DMs aren't open. When President Trump sent ICE into Minneapolis to run amok, his administration was bound to get sued a bunch. The problem is, he's running out of lawyers. That's coming up on Today Explained.

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[Noel King]

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[Kyle Cheney]

Kyle so for months, the Trump administration has been mounting this aggressive not just a mass deportation effort, but a mass detention effort where anyone they want to deport support, even if there's these are people applying for asylum or seeking other legal pathways to remain in the United States. They're, they're locking them up essentially in a way that no previous administration ever has. And the way they're doing that is reinterpreting old laws and trying to apply them in a different way.

[Noel King]

Up until now, only recent border crossers were really subject to mandatory detention.

[Ian Millhiser]

But then came the second Trump Administration now implementing this mandatory detention policy, saying that with very few exceptions, when a migrant is apprehended in these ICE enforcement operations, the government is compelled to detain them without bond as they fight their deportation.

[Kyle Cheney]

And courts around the country have been rejecting this over and over, hundreds and hundreds of times. However, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, a very conservative panel of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, ruled on Friday that the administration's interpretation of those old laws was correct and that they could continue this mass detention campaign on top of their mass deportation campaign.

[Noel King]

What was the Fifth Circuit's reasoning here?

[Kyle Cheney]

So it's somewhat nuanced and complicated, but the idea is whether you treat people who have lived in the United States maybe for decades, no criminal records, people who have built lives here, you can treat them as though they have just arrived in the country, essentially call them arriving aliens is the term in the law. And again, no previous administration has interpreted it this way, but it is a convoluted aspect of these old laws. And, you know, then the fifth Circuit said that what this administration is doing may be different, but just because they're exercising power in a different way mean it's wrong. And they backed them up.

[Noel King]

Okay, so the Trump administration says, we're going to interpret this law differently. Do we? Do we know how the Trump administration landed on the notion that they could interpret the law differently?

[Kyle Cheney]

I don't know necessarily how the deliberations played out, but they did implement this through. It was very discreet. It was a July 8 policy memo from ICE's acting director, Todd Lyons, that basically said, you know, the old way is wrong. We're doing it a new way. And since that day, we've seen this slow explosion of these cases. And now it's not slow anymore. It's all over the country. Every state is seeing these detention cases. We are seeing thousands of cases in court. These are people who are being grabbed under this new policy and saying, that's illegal. You can't do that. So it's been building. And now with Minnesota being the center of this deportation effort, we're seeing a ton of cases come out of there. I see maybe 300 new cases a day around the country. And that's a big uptick from what it used to be, where it was 40 or 50 of those prior to the July memo from the ICE.

[Noel King]

All right, and you said that other judges had previously rejected the Trump administration's interpretation of these laws until they hit the fifth Circuit. You reviewed some of the comments from those other judges. What do they argue here?

[Kyle Cheney]

What they say is, number one, it would be kind of shocking if for 30 years, every other administration had this power to mass detain people and didn't realize it. That would be a little unusual for people not to have known that if Congress had authorized this mass detention strategy, maybe they would have been a little more explicit about it than some sort of nuanced reinterpretation of ambiguous language in an old law. And so that's what they point to. And they say, look, someone who's lived in the United States for decades is not an arriving alien. Just the plain meaning, the common sense reading of that. They also point to a Supreme Court ruling from a few years ago that kind of endorsed this divide between arriving and people who are crossing the border and can be detained in a mandatory way. You know, one of the most pointed responses we saw was from the judge who opposed the fifth Circuit's view. She was the minority judge on this three judge panel that ruled. Her name is Dana Douglas. She said, in a sort of memorable line, she said, straining at a gnat, the majority swallows a camel. And what I think she's saying there is by sort of parsing this sort of minutiae, this sort of confusing verbiage to sort of justify the administration's view of mass detention, they've opened up this sort of pandora's box that's going to lead to untold consequences for the country and for a lot of people that maybe they didn't intend to unleash.

[Noel King]

All right, so this was a ruling by the fifth Circuit, which means it does not apply to the whole country.

[Kyle Cheney]

Right. The fifth Circuit covers Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi. The important caveat to that, though, is enormous number of these cases are coming out in Texas, because even when people are arrested in Minnesota, ice is flying them sometimes very quickly, to Texas, you know, where they have a lot of detention facilities. And also they have a more favorable judiciary. And so that's somewhat by design. And so there are a number of places, and some judges have already said, we reject the fifth Circuit's ruling, you know, in where we. Where we are, because we're not bound by the fifth Circuit's decision. And so that will affect a lot of cases, but a huge number of them do come through Texas at a certain point.

[Noel King]

Does this become a national law? I guess it would have to hit the Supreme Court.

[Kyle Cheney]

Right, right. And I do expect that it will land there. I mean, number one, you know, not just the fifth Circuit, I mean, this again, these cases have been playing out everywhere, thousands of them. And what I'VE seen is, you know, I've counted it more than 3,000 times. Judges have rejected the administration's view of this policy. And that includes, you know, many judges appointed by Donald Trump himself. I think the number is something like 370. Judges have opposed this to only 27 who have sided with the administration on this policy. So the balance. Now that that numbers game doesn't tell you everything. If the circuit rules, the circuit rules, and it kind of overshadows the lower court rulings. But the prevailing consensus view of the legal world, the judge, the judicial world, is that the administration's it wrong. And I suspect that will show up in other circuits and that the Supreme Court will say, look, if the courts are divided all over the country on this, we have to take it up.

[Noel King]

We know that some Americans are sort of horrified by the way that this has been playing out. We also know that there are Americans who are supportive of what the Trump administration is doing. One thing I've noticed that seems to bother Americans across the spectrum is stories of American citizens getting caught up in the immigration crackdown. It seems I could be wrong. It seems like that is avoidable. And yet, you know, you hear these horror stories. Why is this happening?

[Kyle Cheney]

So it is happening.

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What do you mean, overstate? An overstate.

[Kyle Cheney]

I don't know what that is. Where were you born?

[Ian Millhiser]

And don't. I'm from California. Don't lie to me. Where were you born? California. Okay, so we're gonna take you in.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

And verify your information.

[Ian Millhiser]

No, you're not, dude.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

No, you're not. And I told him I was an American citizen. And he look at his other partner like, you know, smiling, like, saying, can you believe this guy?

[Ian Millhiser]

I asked when I would be able.

[Kyle Cheney]

To speak to a lawyer. They never let me. They never told me what I was charged for. They just kind of threw me in there and didn't care. And, you know, I think the more frequently that it happens, the more it, you know, shines a pretty striking light on the mass deportation strategy overall. I think it's because we've seen the courts bless. The Supreme Court in particular, blessed this notion that race can be a factor in the way an accent and language can be a factor in the way immigration officers do. Deportation stops, detention stops, arrests, to at least make an inquiry about someone's status. And a lot of times, if they don't get a satisfactory answer, someone can be arrested. They might have documentation. Maybe it's not with them. Maybe they don't walk around carrying papers. If you're a US citizen. It hasn't been something we've had to do or think about for the most part. Now it's becoming more of a reality where people are getting swept up because of the again, the sort of roving, sweeping effort to detain so many people, you know, that it's very easy. The notion that someone could get swept up as a US Citizen is very easy. And then proving that, especially in a scenario where we just talked about where immigration courts are denying bond, denying even a chance to prove yourself, that could become very complicated. If you're a citizen, say, hey, I'm a citizen. And they say, well, we can't give you a bond hearing. Well, that's the nightmare scenario.

[Noel King]

Where do you think all of this is headed?

[Kyle Cheney]

Well, certainly the Supreme Court. That's just in terms of the most practical sense of that word is I think the Supreme Court's going to have to decide is this mass detention strategy viable? Is it a legitimate interpretation of the law? And then if they say yes, that does sort of reorient the way we view due process in this country because it is again, immigrants, people who are charged with sort of deportable in a civil sense, or they're being told they can be deported, have typically had multiple ways to sort of prove that they should be able to stay here, whether it's through asylum or through other forms of legal status. And this sort of flips it on its head and makes the process so onerous and so punitive that a lot of people may just give up and not even bother with it, which is, I think, part of the strategy by the administration.

[Noel King]

Kyle Chaney, he covers legal affairs for Politico. Coming up, why so many Department of Justice lawyers are crashing out. Support for Today explained comes from Vanta. Business owners know, says Vanta, that the landscape is changing. Risk and regulation are rising. Customers expect proof of security before they even consider signing. Earning trust is critical to closing deals, but it's also costly, complex and time consuming, says Vanta. Vanta says it's their job to make it easy. Vanta says they can automate your process to bring compliance, risk and customer trust together on one AI powered platform. They say they automate the process of achieving and maintaining compliance with over 35 security and privacy frameworks, including that SoC2, that ISO 27001 and HIPAA. This helps companies get compliant, remain compliant, opening doors to next level growth opportunities, freeing up time instead of getting buried in audits and spreadsheets, Vanta says. Vanta gives you a system that runs behind the scenes minimizing risk and powering your growth with confidence, you can get [e-mail] explained. That's V-A-N T A.com explained Vanta.com explained. Support for Today Explained comes from Quince. Quince makes elevated essentials feel effortless, says Quince. They say their clothes are designed for layering and mixing, helping you build a timeless wardrobe made to last. Timeless how? How about a trench coat, a classic pair of jeans, or one of those super soft Mongolian cashmere sweaters? According to Quince, each quince piece is made to last with premium materials in ethical, trusted factories, then priced far below what other luxury brands charge. Our colleague Claire White has gotten into some quints. I recently picked up a few more pieces of the Mongolian cashmere collection from Quint's the Fisherman sweater and a cardigan. I love both of these pieces, not only because the quality is amazing, but.

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[Ian Millhiser]

Oh, yay. Oh, yay.

[Noel King]

This is Today Explained.

[Ian Millhiser]

I'm Ian Millhiser. I cover the Supreme Court here for vox.

[Noel King]

You recently wrote about a Department of justice lawyer named Julie Lee, who, as I understand it, looked a federal judge in the eye and said, this job sucks. What happened?

[Ian Millhiser]

Yeah, she said more than that. At one point, she said that, like, sometimes she wants the judge to hold her in contempt so she can get a night's sleep. So, yeah, what happened here is that Lee was an attorney for the Department of Homeland Security. She volunteered to take an assignment with the U.S. attorney's office in Minneapolis, which is handling this enormous crush of cases caused by the ICE occupation of Minneapolis. And the workload they gave her was just insane, completely unmanageable by any one attorney. She apparently was assigned to 88 cases in a single month. And, you know, that incredible workload is placed on one lawyer. Turns out to be a microcosm for a lot of the dysfunction that is happening in Minneapolis.

[Noel King]

88 cases. How many cases a month is normal, do you know?

[Ian Millhiser]

So the short answer is, it depends on the complexity of the case. You know, I've known lawyers who would spend months and months preparing for one trial, although that, you know, would be a very complex trial. I look for professional guidelines on this. And, like, the professional guidelines say that prosecutors generally shouldn't be assigned more than 150 cases in a year. And this woman was assigned 88 cases in a month.

[Noel King]

Oh, okay.

[Ian Millhiser]

Yeah. So that's about six or seven times more work. She was doing the work of about a half a dozen lawyers.

[Noel King]

And explain what Julie Lee's job is and what she said she was struggling to get done.

[Ian Millhiser]

Yeah. So this is, like, somewhat counterintuitive, but, like, it turns out, one of the reasons why immigrants are being treated so poorly in Minneapolis is because there aren't enough prosecutors. And, like, normally, you don't think of prosecutors as being a good thing for people who are being locked up.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

Right.

[Ian Millhiser]

But what's happening is a lot of these immigrants are being detained illegally. Judges are issuing orders saying, no, no, no, no, no. You have to. You have to release this person. There's one judge who complained that there are more than 90 court orders that the Trump administration has defied.

[Noel King]

This month, the court has found ICE has violated 96 court orders in 74 cases. ICE has likely violated more court orders this month than some federal agencies have in their entire existence.

[Ian Millhiser]

And it looks like a huge reason for that is that the Trump administration, like, they surged law enforcement officers at its peak, there were 3,000 law enforcement officers that the federal government sent to Minneapolis. But they didn't send lawyers. They didn't send, you know, additional clerical staff in the detention facilities. And so what. What happens is a judge issues an order saying, hey, you need to release this person. They're being detained illegally. And now. And normally that order would be sent to the lawyer. The lawyer would notify the detention facility of it. The detention facility would tell the guards, hey, you gotta turn the key and let this person go. And the process would get underway. But because they surged the capacity to arrest people without adding additional personnel for all the legal compliance things that go into something like a massive occupation of a US City, judges are issuing orders to release people, and those orders are not being followed.

[Noel King]

Okay, so ICE is not following court orders because it sounds like in your telling, they can't. They don't actually have the manpower to do it. What happens when the government cannot comply with court orders?

[Ian Millhiser]

I guess. Let me first answer. What happens when someone other than the government defies a court order?

[Noel King]

Cool.

[Ian Millhiser]

And the answer is that you are held in contempt if you really, really defy it. And then there could be all sorts of legal consequences. You can be fined if you are held in contempt. You could be thrown in jail if you are held in contempt. But those contempt orders are enforced by the Department of justice. It's the U.S. marshal Service, which is an arm of the Department of Justice, that will come and take you to jail if a judge orders you jailed, if you're thrown in contempt. So there's sort of this standoff going right now where you've got, the Trump administration is violating all kinds of court orders. You know, as I said, like, one judge counted more than 90 court orders that are. That are being violated. You know, in theory, like, a judge could order the head of ICE thrown in jail, but is the Justice Department actually going to enforce this order? So there's a bit of a harrowing dance going on right now where judges are trying to pressure the Trump administration to comply. And in some cases that succeeded. There was one judge who got someone released because he ordered the director of ICE to show up in court and explain him. And that was enough to get ICE to say, okay, we'll release that one person. But at some point, I think, you know, these judges have to worry about if. If they push as hard as they would push against a private litigant. Is the Justice Department at some point gonna throw up both of its middle fingers and say, well, we're just not Gonna enforce that order.

[Noel King]

Hmm. All right. So, perhaps unsurprisingly, Julie Lee was fired after her outburst.

[Ian Millhiser]

She is no longer working for the Justice Department. I don't know that I know the specific circumstances of why, but she is. She's no longer there.

[Noel King]

We wish her well, but she is not the only person leaving the doj. You reported on what we can, I think, call a mass resignation in the Minnesota U.S. attorney's office. What is happening there that prosecutors are leaving?

[Ian Millhiser]

Yeah, so it appears that there's several layers of things going on here. So the New York Times recently reported U.S. attorney's offices throughout the country. Country have lost about 14% of their lawyers since Trump took over.

[Noel King]

Whoa.

[Ian Millhiser]

A lot of that seems to be the fact that, you know, people just don't want to be doing the things that this administration is. Is asking them to do. That's been particularly concentrated in Minnesota. So there. There's ordinarily about 70 lawyers in the U.S. attorney's office in Minnesota.

[Noel King]

The U.S. attorney prosecuting the massive Minnesota fraud investigation has resigned, The New York Times reporting. Five others have also stepped away.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

Law enforcement source says the resignations were triggered in part by pressure from DOJ leadership to investigate Good. And her widow's connections to activist groups.

[Ian Millhiser]

At least eight other lawyers, it has been reported, walked since then. And that's on top of the attrition that I already described, where, you know, lawyers were already leaving these justice department jobs. The U.S. attorney for Minnesota now admits that his office does not have enough staff to deal with the explosion of civil litigation, all generated during operation metro surge.

[Kyle Cheney]

U.S. attorney for Minnesota Daniel Rosen filed this new declaration in federal court saying, quote, paralegals are continuously working overtime, lawyers are continuously working overtime. All this is happening while the civil division is down 50%.

[Ian Millhiser]

It's gotten so bad that, like, former Justice Department personnel have been, you know, Trump appointees have been tweeting like, hey, we need a usas. Please DM me if you want to work for the Justice Department. Justice Department, which, first of all, is it how, like, DOJ is considered an elite employer. Normally, they do not struggle to find very, very, very qualified job applicants. But beyond that, like, on top of that, apparently the Justice Department is applying an ideological screen where now they are asking people who want to be prosecutors, you know, do you support Donald Trump's agenda? How you help implement, like, which executive orders are you excited about? Yeah. And, like, there's two problems wrapped up. One is that, like, if you setting. I mean, we'll set aside, like, the fact that the DOJ isn't supposed to be politicized in that way. If you limit the universe of your applicants to MAGA lawyers, then you're going to get worse lawyers because it's just a smaller pool.

[Noel King]

Is the administration trying to fill the hole like you said? People, people are tweeting, please come work for us. But do you see a concerted effort on the part of the administration at the highest level to like, get these positions filled?

[Ian Millhiser]

I think that they are trying to do triage. So, like, Bloomberg reported that I think 93 U.S. attorneys offices in the United States, they were each ordered to designate one or two lawyers apiece, will be part of what are called jump teams that I guess will go to areas like Minneapolis where they have a huge amount of needs and try to support the lawyers there. There's also reports that military lawyers, lawyers, JAG attorneys are being deployed to Minneapolis in order to try to pick up some of the slack there. And I mean, again, like, setting aside the questions of, like, whether it's a good idea to have military lawyers doing civilian law enforcement and stuff like that, there's all kinds of problems with this. I mean, if you're taking Lawyers out of U.S. attorneys offices elsewhere in the country, those lawyers are doing important work. You know, we want heroin dealers and terrorists and bank robbers and other people who commit federal crimes to be prosecuted. And if you are being surged to Minneapolis to deal with a bunch of cases brought by illegally detained immigrants, you're not doing the other important work that the Justice Department does.

[Noel King]

What are the longer term implications here? How does this ripple out a year from now, three years from now, five years from now?

[Ian Millhiser]

So I think this is going to be a disaster for the government in the long term for several reasons. I mean, I think back to when I was a young lawyer and like, you think very, very hard about what jobs you want to take because you're, especially when you're early career, you're establishing your reputation. And if you get attached to a bad employer early in your career, that can have repercussions that carry you forever. Think about what happened to Julie Lee. Like, every single potential employer who wants to hire now is probably going to Google her name. And what's going to come up is going to be a bunch of news articles about the time when she told a federal judge that she wanted to be held at contempt of court. And like, the reason that happened is because she was putting this undefeated, tenable position by her employer where she was given such an unmanageable workload that the employer set her up for judicial sanctions. I'm not going to go work for that employer. And no sensible lawyer is going to, is going to want to go work for an employer who's going to do it for them because that, that could be career cancer. And if you look at what happened to Julie Lee, if you look at what's going on with these jump teams and all these lawyers having been surge to all these places because the workload is so intense, if I'm a lawyer who has the option of going to a private law firm and making a whole lot more money than I would make at the Justice Department, you know, I might be willing to take the Justice Department salary if I know well I'm going to have a more reliable workload. I'm going to have job security. I'm going to see my kids more often. Like, there's a lot of attraction things about this federal job, but the Justice Department can't promise that anymore. And that means it's going to have, it's going to struggle to hire people or it's going to have to raise its salaries significantly if it wants to be able to compete for the very, very high caliber of talent that it has historically been able to hire.

[Noel King]

Ian Millhiser, he covers the law for vox. Hadi Mwagdi produced today's show. Aminah El Saadi edited. Patrick Boyd engineered and Dustin DeSoto and Andrea Lopez Cruzado checked the facts. I'm Noel King. It's today, explained.

[Ian Millhiser]

Sam.