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Chief Judge Patrick Schiltz wrote that Justice officials were continuing to violate court orders at a historic clip amid President Donald Trump’s mass deportation push.

The top federal judge in Minnesota tore into Justice Department leaders Thursday and threatened potential criminal consequences for officials who he said were continuing to violate court orders at a historic clip amid President Donald Trump’s mass deportation push.

“This Court will continue to do whatever is required to protect the rule of law, including, if necessary, moving to the use of criminal contempt,” said Chief Judge Patrick Schiltz in a message posted on the docket of an immigration case he is presiding over. “One way or another, ICE will comply with this Court’s orders.”

The George W. Bush appointee said he and his colleagues on the federal bench in Minnesota had begun routinely threatening to hold administration officials in civil contempt — threatening monetary fines — in order to force compliance with their orders in the hundreds of emergency lawsuits brought by people who said they had been illegally detained by ICE.

“The Court is not aware of another occasion in the history of the United States in which a federal court has had to threaten contempt — again and again and again — to force the United States government to comply with court orders,” Schiltz said.

Justice Department aides did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Schiltz’s letter was the latest and most pointed eruption by federal judges grappling with the fallout from Operation Metro Surge, the administration’s crackdown in the Twin Cities. Judges, whose dockets have been swamped by thousands of emergency immigration lawsuits, have ruled in the overwhelming majority that ICE had illegally detained people or violated their constitutional rights. And they’ve grown increasingly frustrated by what they see as routine defiance of orders to release detainees and treat them humanely.

The letter came in a week in which other federal judges around the country had expressed similar alarm, frustration and fury over the administration’s conduct. Texas-based Judge Kathleen Cardone described a “worrying trend” of missed deadlines by Trump administration officials handling immigration cases. Judge Irene Berger of West Virginia lit into the administration for a general “lack of respect for the law,” which she said was compounded by “sloppiness” in its filings; officials said an ICE detainee had been convicted of marijuana possession in 2009 — when records showed he was four years old.

“It ends today,” wrote Zahid Quraishi, a federal judge in New Jersey who described rampant “misconduct” by the administration.

Schiltz’s Minnesota colleagues have also begun escalating their confrontations with the administration. Judge Eric Tostrud held officials in civil contempt and ordered them to pay for the plane ticket of a detainee transferred to Texas in violation of one of his orders. Judge Jeffrey Bryan scheduled a combined contempt hearing next month for two dozen cases in which he said ICE improperly withheld released detainees’ personal property.

For Schiltz, the letter was a follow-up to one he sent in January, accusing the Trump administration of defying more than 90 court orders that month, which he estimated at the time was more than many agencies had broken in their entire existence.

He said that rather than offer any contrition, Minnesota’s top federal prosecutor, U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen, “attacked the court” in a Feb. 9 email and accused Schiltz of overstating the problem. Rosen, the judge said, called Schiltz’s initial rebuke “far beyond the pale of accuracy for an order that would be wielded so publicly and so sharply.”

“The lawyers in my civil division didn’t deserve it,” Rosen wrote.

Schiltz said he spent the last two weeks reviewing his initial list and verifying that it was mostly accurate. But more importantly, he said he had verified that ICE had violated an additional 113 orders in 77 more cases, most of which occurred after his January letter.

“If anything is ‘beyond the pale,’ it is ICE’s continued violation of the orders of this Court,” Schiltz wrote.

The judge reiterated his praise for the overwhelmed line attorneys working under Rosen in Minnesota’s Justice Department office, including Ana Voss, who he noted recently resigned as the office’s civil chief.

“The judges of this District have been extraordinarily patient with the government attorneys, recognizing that they have been put in an impossible position by Rosen and his superiors in the Department of Justice,” Schiltz continued. “What those attorneys ‘didn’t deserve’ was the Administration sending 3000 ICE agents to Minnesota to detain people without making any provision for handling the hundreds of lawsuits that were sure to follow.”