Minnesota’s federal prosecutors zero in on illegal reentry charges under Trump

This story is from Sahan Journal, a nonprofit newsroom dedicated to covering Minnesota’s immigrants and communities of color. Sign up for their free newsletter to receive stories in your inbox.

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Federal prosecutors in Minnesota are charging more people with immigration crimes this year compared to previous years, following President Donald Trump’s directives to prioritize immigration enforcement across the country. 

Prosecutors at the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office are zeroing in on illegal reentry charges, a felony that targets immigrants who cross the border illegally after a previous deportation. 

Legal experts say federal prosecutors in every state are obligated to follow Trump administration orders, because all U.S. attorneys are appointed by the president and confirmed by the U.S. Senate. The consequences of failing to fall in line, they say, can include everything from losing resources to getting fired.

“What are the ramifications of not doing what you’re directed to do? You get fired,” said Tom Heffelfinger, a former Minnesota U.S. attorney. “If you can’t do the job or don’t want to do the job, you quit.” 

Since Trump began his second term in January, the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office has already nearly doubled the average number of illegal reentry cases it typically charged in a year during Trump’s first term.

The office has charged 32 defendants with illegal reentry crimes between February and April. During Trump’s first presidency from 2017 through 2020, the office charged between 15 and 21 defendants each year. During President Joe Biden’s four years in office, it charged between two and seven defendants with illegal reentry each year.

Reentry crimes haven’t historically been charged at high rates in Minnesota, said Linus Chan, an immigration attorney and director of the Detainee Rights Clinic at the University of Minnesota Law School. Instead, they’ve been most common in U.S. Attorney’s Offices in states along the Mexican border, where the crossings occur.

That’s changed this time because of executive orders from Trump and memos from U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi instructing all federal law enforcement offices across the country to prioritize immigration crimes.

In one of his executive orders on his first day in office, Trump ordered the U.S. Attorney General to “prioritize the prosecution of criminal offenses related to the unauthorized entry or continued unauthorized presence of aliens in the United States.”

Likewise, Bondi issued a memorandum in February placing immigration enforcement as the first category under investigative and charging priorities for all employees of the Department of Justice (DOJ), which employs all federal prosecutors. 

The immigration crime mandates also apply to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives; the Drug Enforcement Administration; and even federal agencies that fall outside of the DOJ, like the Internal Revenue Service, according to recent reporting by Reuters. 

“All of them have been told, ‘Don’t enforce laws around drug trafficking or gun trafficking. Only enforce immigration violations,’” Chan said. “So that’s been a big change.”

Chan said federal law enforcement is “doing a lot more interior enforcement” because crossings on the U.S.-Mexican border have dropped from a peak high in December 2023.

The Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office, for its part, is emphasizing in its press releases that the people it is charging with illegal reentry have been previously convicted in federal court of violent or sexual crimes. The office issued two press releases this year announcing four illegal reentry charges against defendants with convictions for child molestation, criminal sexual conduct, attempted burglary and assault with a dangerous weapon. 

But not all of the office’s illegal reentry cases have involved people with serious criminal convictions. 

Of the 32 defendants charged so far this year, six have entered guilty pleas, which detail their past criminal history. Indictments for reentry cases are typically very brief and do not include many details. Of the guilty pleas:

• Two cases mention the defendants’ immigration status as their only crime.
• One mentions the defendant’s immigration status and a traffic violation. 
• Three defendants have prior convictions for sexual or violent crimes on top of their immigration status.

Austin Kocher, a research professor at Syracuse University who tracks immigration cases across the country, said that even though many reentry cases involve people with past convictions for serious crimes, those convictions are old and involve people who are less of a threat than people with pending crimes.

“I don’t think most Americans think of someone with a criminal history from 10 years ago” as an imminent threat, Kocher said. “They think instead of a murderer on the loose, or someone who’s committed sexual violence on the loose.” 

The uptick in reentry prosecutions in Minnesota does not surprise Heffelfinger, who served as Minnesota U.S. attorney from 1991 to 1993 during George Bush’s administration, and from 2001 to 2006 during George W. Bush’s administration. 

The increased reentry charges are likely the result of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement bringing more cases to the office, he said. All U.S. attorneys, he added, have an obligation to follow priorities from the U.S. Attorney General. 

“If the attorney general gives an order and says, ‘We will do ABC,’ you implement ABC,” Heffelfinger said. “That’s your job.”

Heffelfinger recalls that drug and gun prosecutions were among top priorities in Washington, D.C., while he was in office. The whole office had to shift its resources to those cases, he said.

“You may be a white-collar lawyer, but if there’s a gun priority that’s being implemented by (DOJ), you probably will end up working on gun cases, too,” he said.

That prompted some assistant U.S. attorneys who didn’t agree with the priorities to quit during his time in office, Heffelfinger said.

U.S. attorneys who don’t follow priorities from DOJ can face several repercussions, from losing resources in their offices to getting fired, Heffelfinger said. 

The current Trump administration is sending more “aggressive” directives to federal law enforcement than in recent memory, said Nadia Anguiano, an associate clinical law professor at the University of Minnesota. 

One of Bondi’s orders, Anguiano emphasized, directs all U.S. attorney’s offices to give quarterly reports to the DOJ detailing how many immigration cases are referred to their offices, how many they’ve prosecuted, how many they’ve declined to prosecute and the resulting sentences and deportations. 

“That is sending this message that attorneys are being monitored, and that they’re being compared across the country in terms of the numbers of prosecutions and removals,” Anguiano said. “That, in my view, leaves no room to the imagination of what the consequences might be if you don’t measure up to the numbers that the top levels of the administration are seeking.”

Following priorities from the U.S. attorney general also applies to acting U.S. attorneys, Heffelfinger said. Lisa Kirkpatrick is serving as Minnesota’s acting U.S. attorney following former U.S. Attorney Andrew Luger’s resignation from that role in January. Luger, who was appointed in 2022 by Biden, left the office in anticipation of Trump picking someone else to lead the office. 

Kirkpatrick, who has worked in the office for two decades, previously served as first assistant U.S. attorney under Luger.

It’s unclear when Trump will name a nominee to serve full-time as Minnesota’s next U.S. attorney. Minnesota’s Republican congressional delegation earlier this year recommended three finalists for the job: former Minnesota U.S. Attorney Erika MacDonald, who served during Trump’s first administration, and Minneapolis attorneys Ronald Schutz and Daniel Rosen.

Trump, however, is not obligated to pick the delegation’s nominees. 

The Star Tribune reported last December that other people had applied for the opening, including former Assistant U.S. Attorney Joe Teirab, who ran for Congress unsuccessfully last fall as a Republican against Democrat Angie Craig; and Assistant U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson, who is in charge of the office’s fraud and public corruption section and serves as lead prosecutor on the Feeding Our Future case. 

Editor’s note: This story was written by Joey Peters, the politics and government reporter for Sahan Journal.