In a damning incident flagged by Slate legal experts Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern, a prosecutor working in one of President Donald Trump's U.S. Attorney's offices was asked by a judge to count the number of times the office has violated court orders — and he came back with an astonishing figure.
Jordan Fox, a DOJ official assigned to handle the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of New Jersey after Trump's ally Alina Habba was forced to resign by federal courts, was ordered to provide this assessment by U.S. District Judge Michael Farbiarz. This came after the judge issued an order prohibiting Immigration and Customs Enforcement from moving a detainee out of state, only for ICE to do so five days later.
What Fox produced, per the report, was 56 violations — but, Stern said in Slate's podcast, the figure is actually even worse than that.
"Fox actually excluded two categories of violations, missed status update deadlines and late docket notifications. When you include those, it’s 75 violations," said Stern. "So let’s dig into these numbers. At least 17 times, the government transferred a noncitizen to a different detention facility after a court unambiguously prohibited it from doing so. That means they were detained in another state, where it would be harder to reach their lawyers, and perhaps where judges are more inclined to rule for the government. At least 10 times, the U.S. attorney’s office failed to produce evidence ordered by the court. And at least one time, the government deported a noncitizen in direct contravention of a court order forbidding that deportation."
All of this, he argued, is even worse than the Trump prosecutor in Minnesota who crashed out and asked a judge to hold her in contempt because the job was so awful.
"We now have the U.S. attorney’s office not going rogue here, but admitting under oath that it has breached court orders more than 50 times," said Stern. "And there were often dire consequences for the people whose rights were violated. Fox tried to paint this as a few errors around the edges, but to me it depicts a complete breakdown of the system. And it shows that if you sign up for this work — if you agree to work in a U.S. attorney’s office—you now know you will be violating court orders, maybe on the daily."
The bottom line, said Stern, is that "Everybody is on notice: If you are assigned to handle these cases, you will violate court orders, and you may be held in contempt."