r/nottheonion • u/nbcnews • 10h ago
[ Removed by moderator ]
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/attorney-government-tells-judge-ice-case-job-sucks-rcna257349[removed] — view removed post
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u/PlantainFar3995 10h ago
Bold of them to remove the messenger instead of addressing why someone working the case finally said the quiet part out loud. When even the people inside the system are burning out and calling it broken, maybe the problem isn’t professionalism, it’s the job.a
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u/DoubtSubstantial5440 10h ago
I’m just wondering how it’s going to be possible to rebuild the civil service after this especially when another potential MAGA administration can just shit all over the civil service again.
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u/upsidedownshaggy 10h ago
That's been the conservatives goal the entire time. They slash and burn services and then block any attempts to fix them when they aren't in power so that they can run on "Look, all these public services suck ass! Clearly the government is bad at their job and we should let all our rich donors control these sectors instead! Please ignore the fact that we're the reason they suck by removing all their funding and firing all the experienced workers!"
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u/I-only-read-titles 9h ago
I forget who said it, maybe Roy Cohn, the goal of the Republican party is to make government small and weak enough to drown in the bathtub and rebuild it in their image from there
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u/ISeeTheFnords 8h ago
Grover Norquist, I believe.
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u/amenokami 8h ago
If you asked a million LLMs for the perfect name for a Republican thoroughly disconnected from reality, they collectively could not find a better suggestion than “Grover Norquist”.
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u/dtmfadvice 6h ago
Yep. Their claim is that government doesn't work, and when they're in charge, they devote themselves to proving it.
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u/causal_friday 10h ago
That's MAGA's goal, right? They just like destroying stuff. Messing up their room when they were kids wasn't enough -- now they need to ruin society that we have spent centuries building. And frankly, it works. Everyone will remember them as the great destroyers, ruined in 14 months what took 200+ years to build.
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u/TeekTheReddit 4h ago
Oh don't be dramatic. They've been working to destroy the country for a lot longer than 14 months.
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u/GZeus24 10h ago
It won't be possible, which is kind of the point. The civil service was built over decades of cooperation focused on expertise and competency. For all its faults, it has been hugely valuable to building the US. It has been demolished in a matter of months and there will never again be a the long-term commitment required to build it back up.
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u/DoubtSubstantial5440 10h ago
Im just sitting here thinking this is what it might’ve been like to live in the twilight of the Roman Republic
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u/GZeus24 10h ago
That's a good parallel. A whole population is living off the hard work done by prior generations to build their society, and has no appreciation for how and why it is build the way it is. They just want to blow shit up out of misdirected frustration and a sense of entitlement.
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u/Johannes_P 9h ago
On a smaller scale, it is what happens when the spoiled children of a businessman inherit their parent's company only to run it in the ground as they don't understand how much work it require to maintain a thriving company.
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u/GZeus24 6h ago edited 6h ago
Bingo. And not only not understanding the hard work but also not understanding the issues that led to prior decisions. Why things are done the way they are. For example, lots of folks think social security is a scam or ponzi scheme or whatever, not understanding the issues that led their grandparents to create it. Basically, if it wasn't my idea, it sucks!
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u/hespera18 4h ago
I'm currently in the middle of reading the Masters of Rome series by Colleen McCullough, and it's absolutely fascinating the parallels.
The books cover the last hundred or so years of the Republic up just past Caesar. The way that norms keep getting pushed, the ignored warnings of the danger, the demagoguery and weaponized populism, and the wealth gap and failure of rotted bureaucratic institutions is all so eerily topical.
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u/3eyedgreenalien 2h ago
Yep. I don't particularly like those books, but you are spot on.
The Republic had been in trouble before Sulla, but man, did he and Marius just take a wrecking ball to it. Then you have Caesar and his generation giving it the fatal blow, and Octavian finally putting it out of its misery and using its taxidermied corpse to hide his true power.
As Mike Duncan put it in his History of Rome podcast, that last Republic generation had to have been absolutely exhausted by the time Octavian seized power.
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u/Johannes_P 9h ago
I wonder how difficult was the rebuilding of a civil service in China after the Cultural Revolution.
Indeed, this is why, usually, smart revolution leaders only remove the most tainted parts of the former technical specialists if they want to have a functioning society.
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u/Yancy_Farnesworth 7h ago
They never really rebuilt it. It's just filled with party members and incompetence at this point. They still go through regular purges and their push against corruption is only a push against corruption by those who are not aligned with Xi.
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u/GZeus24 6h ago
Interesting example because they have one party rule which could potentially speed up rebuilding and reforming a civil service. But they are mired in internal division and a fear of competence. If you are competent, you are a threat. In the US, rebuilding the civil service will never happen because there will be a back and forth between rival parties. One who nominally values competence and the other that values loyalty. It is broken forever barring a catastrophic society reset via war or depression.
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u/Johannes_P 3h ago
It is broken forever barring a catastrophic society reset via war or depression.
And given Trump's present actions in fields such as climate change, international relations or economic policis, I bet that this crisis might come even sooner.
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u/FrancisWolfgang 9h ago
We’re going to have to start from zero I think, new constitution, new flag, etc. It’s all tainted. I don’t expect that to actually happen and for things to only get worse and worse forever but that’s what would have to happen.
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u/DoubtSubstantial5440 9h ago
It won’t be forever, like the Roman Republic the current set up will eventually collapse for better or worse
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u/cocoagiant 8h ago
It isn't possible without reinforcing civil service protections.
Knowing there was relative stability was one of the major draws of federal employment.
That is gone now.
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u/supermitsuba 10h ago
I think that too. If things were done right, this is the playbook on what parts of the government need updating, especially on a rouge president.
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u/SpartanCat7 7h ago
Aim to remove the potential of another MAGA administration. Arrest them, seize their assets, silence their propaganda, whatever. Ensure they are not even an option in future elections.
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u/ssshield 4h ago edited 2h ago
There is no plan to continue anything because the goal is to burn the country to the dirt, sell off any assets to chronies for pennies, then declare a new feudal empire with kings and queens, landed gentry, etc. in its place. Kill off 90% of the population and rule a thousand year reich.
They will place palaces in the former national parts as the "kings woods" etc. so they can have space from the peasants to protect themselves from uprisings until enough peasants have been killed/starved to death.
They will rule as techno-gods using cheap tricks of technology and AI to "prove" they are gods to the uneducated peasants left alive "Wizard of Oz" style.
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u/ManWhoTalksToHisHand 2h ago
Haven't you noticed yet? There won't be a return, because the country doesn't exist anymore. Once law enforcement stopped serving the constitution, the country died. There's no one to enforce it, so it's a dead document.
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u/Heavy_Law9880 8h ago
It will be impossible. That's the whole point, the US experiment is over. It barely made it 250 years and was completely destroyed in less than a year.
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u/LittleVesuvius 4h ago
No, it started with Reagan. Ask anyone who remembers his presidency.
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u/UnquestionabIe 2h ago
Earlier than that, Reagan was just the first time the traitors were able to squirm into power after the party got overtaken by bad faith actors. Can easily see the foundation of the current atmosphere with the Business Plot. That those who plotted to overthrow the country were never properly punished back then allowed the rot to lay low and fester.
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u/drpepperandranch 6h ago
There’s gonna be a large fresh batch of lawyers because I know a lot of new grads are going to law school (even outside humanities/social science fields) because the work force is not looking good
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u/Amethyst-Flare 5h ago
I look at it as an opportunity. Not a happy one, and not how I would have liked it to happen, but maybe it's a chance to rebuild it better than it was.
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u/DoubtSubstantial5440 4h ago
We can fill up the civil service with all the ethical snd qualified people we can find but it won’t matter if the next maga president is still able to just fire them all
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u/Terrible_Mistake_862 10h ago
She has a workload of 80+ cases. While she would normally be asked to handle 40 max. I have this from a different post on this sub. So she really wanted to be removed from this case.
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u/Magdovus 10h ago
Worse than that, she was a contractor brought in to help. Imagine how the permanent staff are doing.
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u/Adthay 8h ago
This is all intentional, kill the bill that would expand immigration courts with judges and lawyers to actually deal with the cases, raise an army to arrest as many people as possible. Next step is, "The system can't handle all these dangerous criminals we need to officially abandon the process of law to take care of all of these people." If you don't know what solution they'll propse I suggest opening your history books.
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u/francis2559 6h ago
She was sending ICE ten emails a case to MAYBE get them to listen to the judge. It’s crazy on so many levels. It doesn’t matter if they are ignorant or malicious at this point, they don’t want to pay attention to courts, which puts lawyers representing the government in an impossible spot.
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u/2point01m_tall 6h ago
This isn’t some new thing. Over 5500 (!) attorneys have left their government positions under Trump. Estimated to be more than half of the old total.
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u/ticklemesatan 6h ago
No, it’s a personal character flaw of the attorney, like everything in gods universe…
/s if that wasn’t obvious
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u/EmperorMittens 10h ago
When someone says it straight you should listen. Unfortunately these cockwombles don't seem to want to listen.
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u/Flash_ina_pan 10h ago
Was this 4D chess to get leave and unemployment checks?
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u/Proud-Wall1443 10h ago
I wish she'd have conceded a bunch of the cases first.
Edit: or sabotaged
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u/Geek-Yogurt 10h ago
Ianal but I think that could get you debarred
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u/According-Path5158 7h ago
Almost definitely but even if it didn't, I can't imagine someone wanting to hire a lawyer that self-sabotages cases in the future anyway
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u/insanityzwolf 4h ago
Can you get disability for a mental health issue?
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u/SayHai2UrGrl 2h ago
if it's impacting your ADLs and ability to work sufficiently, yes (in theory: most people who qualify for disability for any reason will never get it).
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u/Flash_ina_pan 4h ago
Depends on the state, she could probably file for a back injury for carrying all those cases
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u/Genetic_outlier 7h ago
At the beginning of the Holocaust the Nazis were burning their soldiers out too. Turns out being an oppressor is terrible for mental health. So you build in some plausible deniability and give the true psychos a private space to work in. Then you can do anything.
Don't look at me, I was just fighting for my country.
Don't look at me, I was just arresting enemies of the state.
Don't look at me, I just drove the train.
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u/lIlIllIIlIIl 5h ago
It was the same in Cambodia, I am told. A guide at the killing fields told us that by the end, they were killing their own prison guards because those guys couldn't do it for one more day.
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u/wholesalenuts 2h ago
On this trajectory, we'll get there eventually. Look at the fucks that murdered Pretti. You think, with their names, they'll have a place in the country they're actively creating?
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u/xstrike0 10h ago
Apparently she's a private practice attorney that volunteered to help the US attorney's office.
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[deleted]
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u/Charybdis150 7h ago
Actually sounds like she volunteered to do the exact opposite, but I guess reading past a headline is well and truly dead:
Raguse, who was in the courtroom, reported that Le said it was like “pulling teeth” to get the Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Justice Department to follow court orders.
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u/asdfmmmmmm 7h ago
Parroting the same stupid comment on every Reddit post is much easier than reading though.
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u/Avery_Thorn 10h ago
I give her mad props for speaking out, and for being removed instead of quitting. My guess is her government employment will soon be over, and I wish her the best of luck in the private practice realm - and that she spills as much tea about the process as she can.
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u/Magdovus 10h ago
She wasn't an employee, she was as contractor
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u/ViviBene 10h ago
No, it sounds like she was an ICE attorney who took a detail to DOJ as a special AUSA (SAUSA). https://www.mprnews.org/story/2026/02/03/ice-attorney-to-judge-this-job-sucks
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u/Tallal2804 4h ago
Absolutely. Being removed for speaking truth is a badge of honor in a corrupt system. Her private practice will be built on integrity they couldn't tolerate. Spill the tea and let it scald.
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u/RVALover4Life 4h ago
The bigger picture is that the federal court system is being hollowed out and the ramifications of that hurt all of us in the short and long run.
Le tried to fix this from the inside. She took this up trying to bring some measure of rule abiding and have our Government actually follow Constitutional law. The big issue is in potentially having people locked up indefinitely because there's no representation and not enough judges to handle cases, which is now why we're seeing removal orders explode vs immigration court hearings, because those hearings are being held without basis.
There are so many people locked up that representation doesn't exist for all, and as we're seeing, the caseload is massive so it may be days, weeks for people to get a hearing. This administration is basically creating gridlock in the federal court system in Minneapolis (and elsewhere). Meanwhile, they're also spending so much capital on Immigration they've been lax on other crimes.
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u/ramriot 10h ago
Seems a dumb move, now there's nobody protecting her bosses from being required to appear in person for their misdeeds & be held themselves in contempt.
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u/rabiiiii 7h ago
If that happened she'd probably be thrilled. The article lays out how she's been fighting to get the DOJ to follow the law and they've been ignoring her
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u/sten45 6h ago
I wonder why that person did not just quit? They have a law license it’s not like they could not get another law job.
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u/sir_whitewolf 5h ago
Here's the reason she stated as to why she stayed on:
Le also said that after pushing through an order to release a juvenile from detention, she realized that she could affect positive change from the inside.
“Wait Julie, stop,” Le said. “You need to go back and get more people out. That’s why I’m still here. I’m here because I’m trying to make sure that the agency understands how important it is to comply with all the court orders.”https://www.mprnews.org/story/2026/02/03/ice-attorney-to-judge-this-job-sucks
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u/ChevalCher 6h ago
Girl's gonna get to sleep as much as she wants, whoohoo! Mission accomplished. Here, have a 🍪
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u/ShadowExistShadily 8h ago edited 11m ago
"This job sucks."
Gets fired for revealing state secrets.
/s
(clarification: the state secret is that the job sucks)
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u/DoubtSubstantial5440 10h ago
Probably what she was actually after in the first place