Individual States Join World Health Organization After Trump Drops It

One of the departures is the civil division chief, Ana Voss, who was in charge of handling the hundreds of wrongful detention petitions filed as a result of ICE’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota. Voss wrote in a recent legal brief that she couldn’t “effectively triage and review” every judicial order. Other employees besides the attorneys have also resigned from the office, including a victim witness coordinator and an evidence technician.

The DOJ has scrambled to bring 10 attorneys from other states—five from Washington, D.C., and five from the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, the legal branch of the United States Armed Forces—to try and fill the gaps. But the office is still “woefully understaffed,” according to one former U.S. attorney. Lawyers have their hands full, with 490 immigrants challenging their detention from December 1 to January 26, compared to 375 similar cases in the previous eight years combined.

“They’re in disarray,” said Doug Kelly, who was an assistant U.S. attorney in Minnesota in the 1980s. “I think it’s just demoralizing to the folks who are there.”