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In a candid moment that took the courtroom by surprise, attorney Le bared her frustrations with refreshing honesty. Facing the judge, she confessed, “What do you want me to do? The system is flawed. This job is exhausting.”
She continued, her voice tinged with weariness and determination, “I am using every ounce of energy I have to get you what you need.”
Her frankness didn’t stop there. In a strikingly bold statement, she admitted, “Sometimes I wish you would just hold me in contempt, Your Honour, so that I could finally get a full 24 hours of sleep.”
The exasperated lawyer made a stunning remark.
“Sometime I wish you would just hold me in contempt, Your Honour, so that I can have a full 24 hours of sleep,” Le said.
“I work days and nights just because people (are) still in there.”
Earlier today, it was announced 700 agents would be withdrawn from the city “effective immediately”.
The judge was responsive to Le’s remarks but ultimately showed greater sympathy to those detained.
“What we really want is simply compliance,” Blackwell said.
“Because on the other side of this is somebody who should not have been arrested in some instances in the first place who is being held in jail or put in shackles for days, if not a week-plus, after they’ve been ordered released.”
Blackwell decried the government for taking unlawfully detained people from their homes in Minneapolis to detention facilities across the country and then releasing them without returning them.
“We learn that somebody is put out on the street with just the clothes on their backs and have to figure out how to get back here when they should not have been arrested here in the first place, let alone flown halfway across the continent of North America,” he said.
“We have to now say, bring them back.”
Blackwell was also sharply critical of unlawfully detained people being forced to wear ankle monitors so the government could track their whereabouts.
He also criticised the government releasing people onto the streets when it was -25 degrees outside.
Le spoke of her own concern about how Border Patrol and ICE were targeting people in Minnesota who were not white.
“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 said.
“Again, fixing a system, a broken system, I don’t have a magic button to do it.”
NBC News reported that Le “is no longer detailed to the US Attorney’s Office for the District of Minnesota”.
He was appointed as a judge during the Biden administration.
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