Read the exemption first, because it is the rule.

The Justice Department has proposed letting immigration judges hold people in contempt and impose civil penalties of $1,000 to $3,500 per violation. The penalty reaches attorneys and their clients [1].

Federal government employees, including the DHS attorneys who argue the other side of every one of those cases, are exempt [1].

Contempt power is not unusual. Judges in ordinary courts have it, and it applies to everyone in the room - including government lawyers, who get sanctioned when they earn it.

What is unusual is a contempt authority written to reach one party's counsel and not the other's, in a forum where the two sides are the government and a person facing removal.

DOJ's stated reason is control of the proceedings - immigration judges, it says, need 'every tool available - including the authority to impose civil money penalties - to control the proceedings' [1].

There is something real behind that.

Immigration courts are overwhelmed in a way that is hard to overstate. The backlog exceeds 3.5 million cases, and 370 attorneys left the Executive Office for Immigration Review in 2025 alone [1]. A judge running a docket that size, with staff leaving, has a genuine interest in tools that stop delay.

Gregory Chen of the American Immigration Lawyers Association put the objection in the terms the asymmetry invites: 'By proposing a completely skewed regulation that empowers judges to hold in contempt only the attorneys for immigrants but not ICE attorneys, the Administration has revealed that its goal has nothing to do with the just and balanced rule of law' [1].

The practical effect is worth spelling out beyond the advocacy.

A lawyer who can be personally fined $3,500 for conduct a judge deems contemptuous will calculate differently about pressing an objection, requesting a continuance, or challenging a ruling.

That calculation is the point of a contempt power, and it is why courts normally balance it across the parties.

Here it lands on one.

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