A federal judge in Minnesota on Monday threatened to hold the acting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director in contempt for repeatedly ignoring court orders in immigration-related cases.<\/p>\n
Chief U.S District Judge Patrick Schiltz ordered acting ICE Director Todd Lyons to appear in court this Friday to answer questions in the case of Juan Tobay Robles, who was arrested by federal immigration agents in Minnesota earlier this month.<\/p>\n
Schiltz wants Lyons to explain why Tobay Robles was not given a bond hearing or has otherwise been released from detention within seven days of the judge’s order requiring the Trump administration to provide him that hearing, or release him. <\/p>\n
“This is one of dozens of court orders with which respondents have failed to comply in recent weeks,” Schiltz, a George W. Bush appointee, wrote in his order Monday.<\/p>\n
He added later, \u201cThe Court\u2019s patience is at an end. The Court acknowledges that ordering the head of a federal agency to personally appear is an extraordinary step, but the extent of ICE\u2019s violation of court orders is likewise extraordinary, and lesser measures have been tried and failed.\u201d<\/p>\n
Schiltz said he will hold a hearing Friday at 1:00 p.m. in Minneapolis, where Lyons \u201cmust appear in person to show cause why he should not be held in contempt for violating the Court\u2019s January 14, 2026, order.\u201d<\/p>\n
If the parties file a notice indicating that Tobay Robles has been released from custody before the hearing, the judge said that the court will cancel the hearing and will not require Lyons to appear.<\/p>\n
NBC News reached out to ICE and Tobay Robles\u2019 attorney, Graham Blair Ojala-Barbour, for comment. <\/p>\n
Ojala-Barbour filed a petition on Jan. 8 challenging his client\u2019s detention. Tobay Robles was placed into ICE custody at Fort Snelling, Minnesota, a site of the agency\u2019s St. Paul field office. Schiltz on the same day ordered the Trump administration to respond to his petition by Jan. 12 \u201ccertifying the true cause and proper duration\u201d of Tobay Robles\u2019 confinement. <\/p>\n
Court documents show Tobay Robles first entered the U.S. illegally as a child. He is a citizen of Ecuador and entered the U.S. \u201cwithout inspection as a minor, in or around 1999,\u201d filings say. <\/p>\n
The court said his case was one of “numerous recent cases” challenging the detention of “aliens who have been living in the United States unlawfully.” <\/p>\n
On Jan. 14, the judge said that Tobay Robles was not subject to mandatory detention under U.S. law and said that the Trump administration could not deny his release. The judge ordered a bond hearing for Tobay Robles within seven days and said he must be \u201cimmediately released from detention.\u201d <\/p>\n
Ojala-Barbour notified the court on Jan. 23 that his client was still detained and no bond hearing had occurred. <\/p>\n
In Schiltz’s latest order calling for Lyons to appear in court, he said that the practical consequence of the Trump administration’s failure to comply with court orders “has almost always been significant hardship to aliens (many of whom have lawfully lived and worked in the United States for years and done absolutely nothing wrong).”<\/p>\n
The judge said the court has been “extremely patient” with the administration, which he said has sent thousands of agents to Minnesota to detain undocumented immigrants without planning for the filings of hundreds of petitions challenging their detention or lawsuits “that were sure to result.” <\/p>\n
President Donald Trump and top administration officials have faced widespread criticism and protests over immigration operations in Minnesota. The administration has been surging federal agents<\/a> to the region since December \u2014 around the same time<\/a> that conservative influencers<\/a> resurfaced years-old allegations of day care fraud involving Somali immigrants.<\/p>\n Trump on Monday said he was dispatching White House border czar Tom Homan to Minnesota in the wake of the fatal shooting by a border patrol agent of Alex Pretti on Saturday. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Monday that Homan will be “managing ICE Operations on the ground in Minnesota to continue arresting the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A federal judge in Minnesota on Monday threatened to hold the acting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":433042,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,3,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":{"0":"post-433041","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-states","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-united-states-of-america","12":"tag-unitedstates","13":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","14":"tag-us","15":"tag-usa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/433041","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=433041"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/433041\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/433042"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=433041"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=433041"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=433041"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}