Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., will face challenger attorney Julie T. Le in her primary. Photo by Bonnie Cash/UPI | License Photo
A lawyer who was fired after she complained to a Minnesota judge about her job representing Immigration and Customs Enforcement is challenging Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., for her seat.
Julie T. Le announced she is running as a Democrat against Omar in the primary.
“It’s not because she’s not doing the job,” Le told The Washington Post. “It’s just for what I could bring to the table.” She said that compared with Omar, she believes she would be more moderate.
Le plans to officially announce her candidacy Saturday in the Brooklyn Park suburb of Minneapolis. Her priorities will be immigration reform with pathways to legal residencies, expanding financial aid for colleges and universities, more funding for the arts in public schools and better access to health care. The primary will be Aug. 11.
Le, 47, made headlines in February for saying, “This job sucks,” after a judge admonished her and a colleague because ICE had not released some ICE detainees.
At the hearing in St. Paul, Minn., she joked that she wished U.S. District Judge Jerry Blackwell would find her in contempt of court and put her in jail, “so that I can have a full 24 hours of sleep.”
DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said that Le’s behavior was unprofessional, and Le was fired within hours.
She had taken the job in 2025 to prosecute undocumented and criminal immigrants because “That’s the law,” she told The Post. “You apply the law to everyone. Everyone has to follow it.”
Lawsuits challenging detentions had swamped the federal courts, so she volunteered to help her overwhelmed coworkers during Operation Metro Surge, the enforcement action in Minnesota that began in December.
But she became afraid that her own family could be arrested for their skin color. Le is an immigrant from Vietnam who arrived as a refugee in 1993 at age 14.
When Blackwell pressed Le and her colleague Anna Voss — who has since left the job, too — about innocent immigrants being stuck in detention, Le told him she agreed.
“The system sucks. This job sucks,” she said. “And I am trying every breath that I have so that I can get you what you need.”
But she was overwhelmed with the workload. She stayed at ICE partially because she thought that if one of her family members got arrested, she could help prove that they were here legally.
“Which just sucks,” she told The Post. “And I should not be doing that because my kids were born here in the United States.”
She said she doesn’t regret her outburst in court.
“It is what it is,” she said in the Post interview. “This is me. This is who I am; I am not a perfect individual. But I will always give it the best.”
Le said that while she had wanted to run for office eventually after her three children were grown, the idea to do it now came that day as she left the courtroom. She realized that only legislators could fix the system.
“I was like, ‘OK, I’m an attorney. I can’t do much at all,” Le said. “Legislators are the only ones that can change the law, or update the laws, or do something, so that we can have this under control.”
This week in Washington
President Donald Trump speaks to the members of the media on the South Lawn of the White House before boarding the Marine One helicopter to Hebron, Ky., on Wednesday. Photo by Yuri Gripas/UPI | License Photo
