On Wednesday, Border Czar Tom Homan said he's reducing the number of federal immigration agents in the Twin Cities, sending around 700 of the roughly 2,700 back to other sectors. But there is is now another, possibly catastrophic issue facing the state: wave afetr wave of resignations by U.S. Attorney's office prosecutors in Minnesota.
It's now become a stunning departure of federal employees who are leaving at an alarming rate.
Four of the federal prosecutors who led a $250 million fraud case have resigned from the U.S. Attorney's Office in Minneapolis, part of the wave of departures that has slashed the district staff. That includes former interim U.S. Attorney Joseph Thompson who was part of the first group of eight that left. Another group of attorneys left the office earlier this week.
CBS News sources say the office now has as few as 17 assistant U.S. attorneys, down sharply from 70 during the Biden administration.
The resignations are coming in part over the massive federal immigration enforcement crackdown and clashes with protesters in the state, and the pressure coming from Washington on how to prosecute - or not prosecute - cases.
Among these departures, Julie Le, an ICE attorney who moved to the Minnesota U.S. Attorney's Office in January to help it respond to what she called "a tidal wave" of civil filings from detainees.
According to a court transcript, Le told a U.S. District Court judge during a hearing in St. Paul that "her job sucks," and asked to be held in contempt so she could "get 24 hours of sleep."
Le had picked up 88 immigration cases in less than a month, and went on to say, according to a court transcript, "what do you want me to do? The system sucks. This job sucks, and I'm trying every breath that I have so that I can get what you need."
Many of the attorneys who have stepped away fro the U.S. Attrorney's office were also working on fraud cases that have plagued Minnesota since first being discovered in the nonprofit Feeding Our Future case by former U.S. Attorney Andrew Luger. That work was continued under Thompson.
More resignations have come from the attorneys who have been working on the case against Vance Boelter, the man who allegedly assassinated former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortmen, shot Minnesota state Sen. John Hoffman, and was potentially targeting dozens of otehr Democratic lawmakers.
Meanwhile, a new report from Politico reporter Kyle Cheney says the top Trump-appointed proseutor in Minnesota, Daniel Rosen, says his office is dropping "pressing priorities" to manage crushing immigration workload, saying his short-staffed office is doing "constant overtime and bouncing between contempt hearings."
They report a filing from Rosen last week in the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals shows the office is being crushed by the workload.
"In this month alone, over 427 habeas cases have been filed in this District," the filing says. "That is in addition to the 100+ cases filed in the second half of 2025. This flood of new litigation imposes an enormous burden on this U.S. Attorney's Office. The pace of such cases is expected to continue."
Politico also reports that in a filing accompanying Rosen’s statement, Justice Department attorneys emphasized that the “crushing burden” caused by immigration cases had led U.S. attorneys offices to “shift resources away from other critical priorities, including criminal matters.”
Resignations could have dire effect on ongoing criminal cases in Minnesota
The Trump administration has been pushing for a crackdown and federal investigation into the massive amounts of fraud in Minnesota. Rosen is a Trump appointee that was confirmed by the Senate in October 2025, but so far he has been far less visible in Minnesota than other U.S. Attorneys. Thompson, then working as an Assistant U.S. Attorney, handled the public press conference announcing the latest fraud cases stemming from state Medicaid claims.
Thompson said before resigning in January, that fraud case could total half of the $18 billion the state spent on the program. There are also ongoing investigations of funding for autism centers, and yet more connected to Feeding Our Future, not to mention any not yet made public.
Much of that happened while the department was led by Thompson and before that, Luger.
The next trial for Feeding Our Future gets underway in April. There are seven more defendants, and all four of the prosecutors that had been leading that are gone.
CBS Minnesota reporter Jonah Kaplan says the new attorneys assigned to handle fraud come from completely different divisions inside the U.S. Attorney's Office.
"The two people that are now going to be on that case that are going to be appearing and representing us, the people of Minnesota, the people of the United States, they've only been, according to their LinkedIn pages, at the U.S. Attorney's Office for the last two years," Kaplan explains. "And one of them, well, she was working in the violent Crimes and Gang Division. This is white collar crime. This is fraud."
CBS News Justice Correspondent Scott MacFarlane and Kaplan are reporting four of those prosecutors have resigned, leaving the future of those investigations in doubt in light of the other cases bogging down the office.
While the departures come for numerous reasons, including the immigration activity in Minnesota, the overload of work for prosecutors, and the moral reasoning some have taken issue with when it came to pressure from Attorney General Pam Bondi and the Trump administration, the totality of it is creating chaos.
"This is a Job that is demanding to begin with changing administrations, changing priorities, structural changes," Kaplan said Thursday talking to Vineeta Sawkar on the WCCO Morning News. "People get new opportunities. A lot of times prosecutors move on, they go into private practice, they go into the private sector. Maybe they're elevated to judges. But this kind of volume and the responsibilities of this office, and you think about what they've been doing over the past several years, what now with those cases? What now with those investigations? And that's the big question."
Chaos in the courtroom?
In an update from Minneapolis officials on Wednesday, State Senator Scott Dibble (DFL) says a hearing earlier this week shed light on the legal chaos surrounding recent ICE detentions.
"Even lawyers working on this every day do not know how many people have been taken into detention, where they are, whether they have legal status, or where they are going," Dibble explained.
MacFarlane shared late Wednesday a letter from over 300 former Justice Department attorneys asking Bondi to allow local investigators to probe both the Alex Pretti and Renee Good killings by federal agents in January. In the letter, they argue blocking state and local agencies from investigating potential violations of state law in their own jurisdictions "poses a threat to the rule of law."
A week ago, a conservative District Court Judge in Minnesota, Patrick Schiltz, scolded the Justice Department for continually ignoring his court orders, even going so far as to demand the head of ICE, Todd Lyons, to appear in court. Instead, the DOJ released an immigrant detainee which satisfied the court, but didn't stop the questions around the department following the courts from raging on. And the workload and moral questions from creeping even more into chaos in the U.S. Attorney's Office.
Schiltz was spotlighting the government's failure to comply with nearly 100 court orders since Jan. 1 in 74 cases in which people arrested during Operation Metro Surge have sued seeking release or other relief. Even that number, he said, is "almost certainly substantially understated."
“This list should give pause to anyone — no matter his or her political beliefs — who cares about the rule of law. ... ICE has every right to challenge the orders of this Court, but, like any litigant, ICE must follow those orders unless and until they are overturned or vacated,” Schiltz wrote.