Trump admin confesses to a stunning 'mix of incompetence and malice'

U.S. President Donald Trump reacts in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., September 19, 2025. REUTERS Ken Cedeno

Slate reports that on Jan. 26, U.S. District Judge Michael Farbiarz not only prohibited Homeland security agents from illegally moving a detainee out of state but also demanded President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice attorneys pen a list of all the violations they committed while defying his orders.

Under the argument of seeking to craft a “remedy” against further Homeland Security insubordination, Farbiarz demanded a thorough act of self “investigation” to pinpoint where DOJ’s chain of command broke. In a rarely recorded act of law 101, the judge also requested DOJ lawyers “enumerate each instance” where the department had “violated an order issued by a judge of this district” since Dec. 5.

Last Friday, associate deputy attorney general delivered the goods.

Slate reporter Dahlia Lithwick said Fox admitted the department had “violated at least 56 court orders since December alone, all related to the Trump administration’s unlawful policy mandating the indefinite detention of noncitizens legally entitled to a bond hearing.”

The confession, first reported by Politico’s Kyle Cheney even accompanied a letter declaring that department representatives “regret deeply all violations” while insisting all were “unintentional and immediately rectified once we learned of them.”

“This story illustrates the mix of incompetence and malice that is defining the administration’s mass detention campaign,” said Slate court reporter Mark Joseph Stern, describing a government that arrested an individual with no criminal record or order of removal. It then hustled him to Texas, where his lawyers had to go find him and serve a writ of habeas corpus to return both him and is property.

“The government did neither. It released him in Texas, not Minnesota, and withheld all of his property, including his driver’s license and other identification paperwork. So he was just dumped and abandoned. His lawyers had to go … and tell her that her order had been flagrantly violated, which is when she scheduled the hearing,” said Stern.

Homeland security had yet to return his identification cards long after the detainee made it back home, forcing an attorney to hold the JAG lawyer in civil contempt until the cards were returned, with the $500 daily sanction against federal attorneys.

“What will it take to make ICE comply with the law? The answer is dragging JAGs into your courtroom and holding them in contempt,” said Stern.

Lithwick commented that the DOJ has lost so many employees under Trump that “the caseload is impossible.”

“Nobody can do this volume of work. If you are a government lawyer thinking, Step aside … because I can do this better next time, just know you’re being set up to pay $500 a day for the privilege,” said Lithwick said.

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