When a Trump-appointed federal judge is telling Immigration and Customs Enforcement that it cannot simply toss the Constitution in the shredder because compliance is “inconvenient,” you know things have gone seriously off the rails.
U.S. District Judge Nancy Brasel issued a blistering decision finding that ICE is violating the constitutional rights of immigration detainees held in Minnesota’s Whipple Federal Building and issued a temporary restraining order telling the government to knock it off. Immediately.
“The Constitution does not permit the government to arrest thousands of individuals and then disregard their constitutional rights because it would be too challenging to honor those rights,” Brasel wrote in what should be an uncontroversial statement of black-letter law but, well, 2026 makes fools of us all.
The plaintiffs, noncitizen detainees and a nonprofit that represents noncitizens, didn’t come to court with vibes or hypotheticals. They came armed with detailed, specific, and damning evidence. ICE, meanwhile, showed up with what Brasel described as “threadbare declarations,” vaguely insisting that everything is totally fine despite the hard evidence presented by plainitffs.
“The gulf between the parties’ evidence is simply too wide and too deep for Defendants to overcome,” Brasel wrote. Yikes.
As described in the order (available in full below), what ICE has implemented at the Whipple Building reads like a system designed specifically to be hostile to constitutional rights.
Detainees are processed and transferred almost immediately and without notice, making it virtually impossible for attorneys to know where their clients are, or how long they’ll remain at any given facility. If that sounds like a nightmare for due process, welp, that seems like a feature, not a bug of the system.
But it gets worse. Phone lists provided to detainees frequently lack information identifying which organizations actually provide legal services. The phones themselves are located in open areas, where conversations can be overheard by ICE agents… because nothing says “right to counsel” like having the government listen in. Attorneys have at times been physically barred from entering the building altogether, with the government hand-waving about the “chaos” that would supposedly ensue if lawyers were allowed access to their own clients. Plus the detainees are prohibited from sending mail or email, cutting off yet another potential avenue of communication.
Judge Brasel’s TRO mandates that detainees be given access to in-person visits with their lawyers seven days a week, along with free, private, and unmonitored telephone calls to counsel and family members within one hour of detention, and before any out-of-state transfer.
None of this is radical, it’s pretty basic constitutional law. But the fact that a Trump appointee of all judges had to spell this out so plainly underscores just how normalized constitutional shortcuts have become in immigration enforcement.
Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter @Kathryn1 or Mastodon @Kathryn1@mastodon.social.
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