The big, final, for-all-the-marbles showdown hearing between Chief Judge Patrick Schiltz of the federal district of Minnesota and Todd Lyons, the head of ICE, scheduled for this Friday afternoon, has been quietly cancelled.
Or not so quietly, as it turns out. The reason the hearing was cancelled is that “Juan,” the illegal immigrant subject of the habeas corpus petition, was released back into the wild. Now ICE has to track him down all over again.
In his order cancelling the Friday hearing, Judge Schiltz included in File No. 26-cv-107 a four-page appendix, purporting to list all of the habeas orders (96 arising from 74 different cases) that ICE has allegedly violated since January 1. The judge writes,
ICE has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence.
Ok, buddy. The judge’s list includes habeas cases filed as recently as Monday, January 26. Since January 1, nearly 500 habeas cases have been filed in Minnesota. The pattern usually goes like this: a case is filed and the very same day the judge orders the immediate release of the detained subject, without even notifying ICE, much less hearing from them, first.
In many cases, the deadlines and conditions imposed in these orders appear to be logistically impossible to meet, in a system holding some 70,000 detainees, nationwide. I infer from the numbers the judge put forward that ICE is complying, on time, with the vast majority of court orders issued in habeas cases.
All of the above would have come out, no doubt, had the Friday hearing moved ahead as originally scheduled.
