'Absurd' attack on judge by Trump DOJ leaves civil rights litigator aghast

President Donald Trump's civil rights chief, Harmeet Dhillon, took to the right-wing Newsmax channel on Friday to bash a magistrate judge who blocked the ongoing detention of Minnesota activists charged with conspiracy against rights for protesting inside a church where an ICE official worked.

"When you go in front of a magistrate with these types of charges, it's not known to the people who are being charged in advance, that's the beginning of the process to get an arrest warrant," said Dhillon. "We made a presentation to the magistrate judge, two of my prosecutors worked tirelessly from Sunday night until presenting on Tuesday with the U.S. attorney's office, and the attorney general was right on the scene as well. And the magistrate judge, who is married to someone who works for Attorney General Keith Ellison, who has had a lot to say about ICE, and a lot to say about our FACE Act theory, declined to give us all that we were asking for."

"So that's just part of the process, there are many other steps in this process, and there are other ways to pursue charges," she continued. "I personally think this magistrate judge abdicated his duty, he should have looked more carefully at the evidence. Unfortunately, a lot of these judicial officers, and he's an inferior judicial officer, he's not an Article III judge, are unfamiliar with the FACE Act's protection of houses of worship, because prior administrations have never pursued it."

These remarks shocked Institute for Justice civil rights attorney Patrick Jaicomo, who took to X to express his reaction.

"It is bad form for any lawyer to attack a judge, rather than his ruling," wrote Jaicomo. "But it’s absurd for a DOJ lawyer to attack a magistrate judge for being a non-Article-III judge while DOJ sanctions ICE agents writing their own 'warrants' based on 'orders' from executive-branch 'judges.'"

The organizer of the church protest, Nekima Levy Armstrong, herself an attorney, has gone on record saying that they did not enter Cities Church intending to disrupt the sermon, and only began chanting and loudly protesting when the pastor escalated the situation upon realizing they were anti-ICE activists.