Julie T. Le spent the better part of 2025 prosecuting illegal immigrants in Minnesota. Then she got fired for venting in a federal courtroom. Now she's running for Congress.
UPI reported that Le announced she is running as a Democrat against Rep. Ilhan Omar in the primary. She plans to officially announce her candidacy Saturday in the Brooklyn Park suburb of Minneapolis, with Minnesota's Democratic primary election set for Aug. 11.
The story behind her candidacy is stranger than anything a campaign consultant would engineer, and it says something real about the mess that immigration policy has become in this country.
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, 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."
The full exchange, drawn from the court transcript, was even more raw:
"The system sucks. This job sucks. And I am trying every breath that I have so that I can get you what you need."
DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said that Le's behavior was unprofessional, and Le was fired within hours. Her colleague Anna Voss, who was also admonished by the judge, has since left the job too.
Le does not regret any of it. She said she did not regret the outburst, saying "it is what it is," and that she told the truth. Then, in a line that apparently launched a congressional campaign:
"This is me. This is who I am; I am not a perfect individual. But I will always give it the best."
Le's biography is genuinely compelling. She started her legal career two decades after graduating from high school, after stints working as a nursing home aide and an insurance claims adjuster, among other jobs, graduating from law school in 2019 and working first in private practice.
She resigned to work as an Immigration and Customs Enforcement prosecutor arguing in immigration court that criminals or people ineligible for asylum or other benefits should be deported.
She believed in the mission. She said she was proud to work for ICE and to protect the United States: "That's the law," she said. "You apply the law to everyone. Everyone has to follow it." But Le said she had never voted for Trump and opposed his enforcement style.
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. According to court records, Le was named as the government's attorney on more than 80 immigration cases in the state after Operation Metro Surge began. That is a crushing caseload by any standard.
Walking out of the courtroom the day she erupted, the idea crystallized:
"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."
Fair enough. But there is a gap between recognizing that Congress needs to act and concluding that you belong in Congress, especially when the seat you want belongs to one of the most entrenched progressive incumbents in the country.
Le will enter a primary race to unseat Omar, who has represented Minnesota's 5th congressional district since 2019 and has handily defeated primary challengers and won re-election in three previous election cycles.
Omar's campaign also has key endorsements from Democratic members of Congress and more than $1 million on hand as her campaign entered 2026.
Le is diplomatic about the incumbent. She told the Washington Post: "It's not because she's not doing the job. It's just for what I could bring to the table." She said that compared with Omar, she believes she would be more moderate.
Moderate is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. Omar has called for abolishing ICE. Le spent 2025 as an ICE attorney. The contrast writes itself.
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.
Nothing about that list is particularly surprising for a Democrat running in a Minneapolis-area seat. But Le's framing of immigration is at least different from Omar's abolitionism. She witnessed the chaos firsthand. She believes in enforcement. She just also wants a system that actually works.
That is, broadly, a reasonable position. The immigration system is broken. The answer is not to eliminate enforcement or pretend the law does not apply. Le seems to understand that. What she will do in practice, inside a Democratic caucus that treats enforcement as a moral failing, is a different question entirely.
Le is one of several former officials critical of the administration to seek public office. Others include a fired federal prosecutor running for the House in Virginia, a former U.S. Capitol Police officer seeking a House seat in Maryland, and twin brothers and former Army officers who raised alarms about the issues at the heart of Trump's first impeachment. All are Democrats.
The left is clearly recruiting from the roster of people who left or lost federal jobs. Some of those people have legitimate grievances. Some are simply capitalizing on a news cycle. Le's case is harder to categorize. She took a job enforcing immigration law. She believed in the legal framework.
She got overwhelmed, broke professional decorum in a courtroom, got fired, and is now running for Congress on a platform that includes the very enforcement mechanisms her eventual party prefers to pretend away.
Let that sink in: Ilhan Omar's most credible primary challenger to date is a refugee from Vietnam who voluntarily signed up to prosecute illegal immigrants and genuinely believes the law should apply to everyone.
The Democratic Party's 5th district is going to have an interesting summer.