Left: Judge Laura Provinzino appears before the Senate Judiciary Committee on July 10, 2024 following her nomination. Right: Attorney General Pam Bondi speaks with reporters after briefing House Oversight Committee members on the investigation into convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein on Capitol Hill on March 18, 2026 (Francis Chung/POLITICO via AP Images).
The Trump administration is crying foul and claiming a judge “wrongly” wielded her contempt power against a fill-in DOJ attorney to “coerce” ICE”s “speedier” compliance with a court order in a Minnesota habeas corpus case.
The DOJ told the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday that U.S. District Judge Laura Provinzino’s “manifestly improper” decision last month to hold a lawyer with the Judge Advocate General’s Corps of the Army in civil contempt as a tool to force DHS and ICE’s compliance with court orders should be vacated.
Provinzino, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, had ordered in early February that an “unlawfully detained” Mexican man living in Minnesota “since 2018 with his lawful permanent resident spouse” must be released from ICE custody in El Paso, Texas, and returned to the North Star State. When ICE let Rigoberto Soto Jimenez out of the El Paso facility, however, he didn’t have his Minnesota driver’s license or Mexican Consulate ID, and he wasn’t returned to Minnesota.
More than a week passed with the status quo unchanged, and so the judge grilled special assistant U.S. attorney (SAUSA) Matthew Isihara about why the government failed to comply with the court order. As Law&Crime reported previously, Isihara said he was sorry it fell “through the cracks” and explained he’s taken on 130 cases in a month’s time while detailed at an office roiled by resignations amid Operation Metro Surge.
After the hearing to show cause on Feb. 18, the judge found Isihara in civil contempt and imposed a daily $500 “coercive fine,” to start on Feb. 20 and to continue until he could file a document confirming compliance.
Provinzino’s order did not come out of nowhere, as just weeks earlier a DHS attorney helping out at the U.S. Attorney’s Office made national headlines by asking a different frustrated judge to hold her in contempt so she could get some sleep. One week after the contempt order against Isihara, the chief judge of the court spoke out, said neither judges nor lawyers “deserve” the “impossible” situation DOJ “superiors” unleashed, and threatened to use criminal contempt to force compliance if need be.
Ultimately, as the DOJ’s own appellate filing recounted, Isihara was not fined a single dollar — because the government just one day after Provinzino’s order confirmed that Jimenez’s property was returned, purging the contempt.
In case that series of events left the impression that Provinzino’s action was simple and effective, the DOJ made sure to tell the 8th Circuit not to be fooled. Rather, Provinzino “held” Isihara’s career “captive” and subjected him to potential “permanent professional consequences” in an “improper attempt to coerce the defendant federal agency into speedier compliance with an order against that agency,” the filing said.
“Petitioner emphasizes that ICE promptly came into compliance with the court’s habeas order and that the court declared the contempt order purged before Mr. Isihara paid any daily fines. But that only underscores the problem: the fact that the court held a personal-capacity contempt order against Mr. Isihara purged based on compliance by his client makes clear that Mr. Isihara and his legal career were wrongfully held captive to induce ICE’s compliance,” the DOJ asserted. “That ICE complied before Mr. Isihara was forced to incur personal-capacity fines should not perversely immunize the court’s improper order from review. Normally, a party facing civil contempt has the option of complying, thereby purging the contempt, or continuing to resist and seeking further review. Mr. Isihara, however, lacked that choice because—to state the obvious—a SAUSA in the District of Minnesota does not control ICE.”
In a parting shot, the DOJ accused the judge of abusing her authority and invited the 8th Circuit to stop her from using contempt “as a weapon” and “as a wedge to set an attorney against his own client.”
“It would be entirely appropriate for this Court to exercise its supervisory authority to prevent district court judges from deploying personal-capacity contempt sanctions against government attorneys as a weapon to influence ICE or other agencies,” the filing said.
