type: timeline_event
On March 3, 2026, a federal judge in New Jersey threatened the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency and its leadership with criminal contempt after documenting seventeen instances in which ICE had transferred detained immigrants out of New Jersey in violation of court-issued no-transfer orders. The judge required ICE officials to sign written affidavits in each individual immigration case acknowledging the existence and requirements of outstanding court orders — an extraordinary accountability measure reflecting judicial exhaustion with repeated noncompliance.
The Pattern of Violations
The case that catalyzed the order involved Baljinder Kumar, a migrant held at Delaney Hall, a detention facility in Newark. Kumar had filed a habeas corpus petition arguing that federal law entitles non-citizens to a bail hearing before an immigration judge. Judge Michael Farbiarz issued a no-transfer order for Kumar on the morning of January 26, at 7:58 a.m. The U.S. Attorney's Office notified ICE of the injunction within thirty minutes. ICE transferred Kumar to a detention center in Los Fresnos, Texas, on January 31 — five days after receiving clear notice of the order.
Farbiarz documented at least seventeen such violations since December 5, 2025: seventeen detainees moved out of New Jersey in defiance of active no-transfer orders. In his March 3 ruling, the judge wrote that what had initially appeared to be administrative inadvertence was beginning to "inch closer to looking intentional" given the frequency and repetition of the violations. "When the same mistakes happen over and over again — the picture can start to look different," he wrote.
The Remedy: Written Acknowledgment Requirements
To enforce future compliance, Farbiarz ordered ICE officials to personally sign written affidavits in each individual case acknowledging the existence and specific requirements of any outstanding court order. The measure was designed to close the gap between institutional notice — served on the U.S. Attorney's Office — and operational compliance by individual ICE officers who transferred detainees without checking active injunctions.
DOJ Acknowledgment
The Department of Justice acknowledged to the court that ICE had violated 56 court orders across the District of New Jersey in the approximately two months since the January 2026 enforcement surge began — an average of nearly one violation per day during the most intensive phase of the deportation campaign.
Significance
The New Jersey contempt threat, occurring on the same day as the Minnesota Judge Bryan contempt hearing in St. Paul, illustrated the geographic breadth of the constitutional crisis generated by the administration's enforcement surge. In both districts, federal judges were simultaneously threatened with the prospect that their lawful orders would simply be ignored, and were deploying contempt as the primary remaining enforcement mechanism. The simultaneous multi-district nature of the noncompliance — coordinated by a single executive agency under centralized leadership — supported judicial characterizations of the violations as systematic rather than accidental.