Another judge’s ruling in Minnesota has made national headlines. From Bill Melugin of Fox News:
Micko is a magistrate judge, meaning he is an employee of the local district court, rather than a judge appointed by the President and confirmed by the U.S. Senate.
Don Lemon, of course, is the disgraced former CNN personality turned independent journalist. Lemon, you may recall, while still working at CNN in 2014, mused on air that the missing Malaysian jetliner had been swallowed by a black hole. At the time, The Atlantic magazine rated Lemon’s black hole theory as, “unlikely,” writing,
Last night, CNN’s Don Lemon speculated that the missing Malaysia Airlines flight may have disappeared from the Earth because of a black hole. An Ivy League astronomer thinks that’s unlikely.
On Sunday, Lemon participated in the invasion of a Baptist church service in St. Paul, in a fruitless search for an ICE agent. Three others were arrested in the incident, but not Lemon, thanks to the interventions of Judge Micko.
For the past few weeks, we’ve been following another example of local federal judicial activism around the hundreds of habeas corpus petitions filed this year. As quickly as ICE agents can detain illegal aliens in Minnesota, unidentified lawyers are rushing to court to get orders for their release.
As of today (Friday, Jan. 23), 342 habeas petitions have been filed in Federal District Court in Minnesota since the beginning of the calendar year. That number represents most (59 percent) of all the 579 civil cases filed with the court in 2026.
The court only began accepting new cases for the year on January 5.
Expressed a different way, in 2025, it took until February 13 before we reached civil case No. 579 of all types.
A case in point is File No. 26-cv-301. Piecing together the little bits of information available to the public, the plaintiff is Liban Guhad a citizen of Somalia. His case was filed on January 14.
The habeas corpus petition itself is not available for viewing by the public. The next day (January 15) district Judge Susan Nelson (Obama appointee) ruled that Guhad cannot be deported, without ever hearing from the government (representing the people).
On January 16, Judge Nelson issued a second ruling in the case, still without hearing from the government.
On January 20, Judge Nelson issued an unpublished order which required some undisclosed action on the part of the government.
Today (January 23), Judge Nelson is holding a video-only hearing (not in open court) on the issue of holding the government in contempt of court for not following her orders that they were not allowed to respond to.
Star Chamber stuff.
