A federal judge in Minneapolis has ruled that the United States government violated the rights of a federal public defender after an immigration officer circulated a memo falsely accusing the lawyer of helping his client evade arrest — and the judge has now ordered prosecutors to correct the record in writing to everyone who received it.

Source: Minnesota Current

In an order reported on Friday, November 13, 2026, U.S. Magistrate Judge David Schultz called the claim against Assistant Federal Public Defender Matthew Deates “reckless and false.” Schultz found that the Justice Department violated Deates’s rights by spreading the falsehood through a criminal case and then leaving him with no way to clear his name, according to the Minnesota Current’s account of the order.

The dispute began with a memorandum written on April 29 by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deportation officer Michael J. O’Neal. Under the subject line “Aid and Abetting,” O’Neal accused Deates of aiding his client’s escape from immigration arrest — an accusation that, as Deates’s lawyer later put it, exposed a respected defense attorney to public suspicion of a federal felony.

What actually happened outside the courthouse

Deates’s client was Ezequiel De Jesus Portillo Rodriguez, a Salvadoran man who had been deported from the United States in 2017 and was charged in Minnesota with felony reentry. On April 28, Deates appeared with him in federal court in Minneapolis, and Judge Schultz released Portillo Rodriguez on pretrial release without objection from prosecutors and allowed him to return to California.

Source: MPR News reporting, via Immigration Analytics

After the hearing, Deates helped his client find lunch and walked with him about one block from the federal courthouse to the Government Plaza light rail station so he could begin the trip back to California, according to Deates’s own court filing of October 1. Only later did Deates learn that an ICE deportation officer and two U.S. marshals had followed them, apparently intending to make an arrest. The next day, O’Neal wrote the “Aid and Abetting” memo.

How the memo reached lawyers in a case Deates had nothing to do with

The memo surfaced months later inside discovery — the evidence prosecutors must hand over to the defense — in United States v. Sant, the federal conspiracy case against 15 Minnesotans accused of conspiring to impede and injure federal immigration officers. Deates does not represent any of those defendants and has no connection to that case, and it remains unclear why the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office included the memo in the material it sent to their lawyers in August.

Deates’s attorney, Chris Madel, asked the U.S. Attorney’s Office to correct the record in a letter on September 4. In their September 25 response, U.S. Attorney Dan Rosen and Assistant U.S. Attorney Tory Sailer wrote that the memo was not relevant to the Minnesota 15 case and “does not reflect the position of the United States Attorney’s Office” — but they stopped short of acknowledging that the allegation itself was false. Prosecutors instead asked the lawyers who had received the memo to return it.

An apology from the bench in October — and a harder order in November

At a hearing on October 20, Judge Schultz apologized to Deates from the bench, telling him “this should not have happened.” Assistant U.S. Attorney Sailer called the memo’s release “an oversight,” blamed confusion over which agent was which, and confirmed that Deates is not under investigation. Schultz said he would order prosecutors to destroy every copy of the memo they had distributed and replace it with a version blacking out Deates’s name, and he said plainly: “On the face of the memo, it’s clear that Mr. Deates did not and could not have committed any crime.” At that hearing, however, the judge said he was unsure he had the authority to grant Deates’s request for a formal finding that he broke no law.

Source: MPR News reporting, via Workers Rights News

The November 13 order goes further than the October hearing. Schultz has now made that formal finding in writing: the claim was “reckless and false,” the government violated Deates’s rights by circulating it and failing to correct it, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office has one week to tell everyone who received the false memo, in writing, that it was sent in error — with the judge’s order attached.

Why this matters beyond one Minneapolis lawyer

Federal public defenders represent people who cannot afford a lawyer — in immigration-related criminal cases in Minnesota, that includes many newcomers facing reentry and other federal charges. Lawyers and court watchers say a written accusation that a defender committed a felony simply by walking his released client to a train station risks chilling exactly the work courts depend on: making sure a released person understands and follows the court’s own orders. For immigrant communities in the Twin Cities — including Punjabi and other South Asian families in Minnesota — the case is a concrete example of how an internal enforcement memo, once it leaves the agency, can follow a person through the legal system even when a judge has already ruled it baseless.

What happens next is dated and narrow: the U.S. Attorney’s Office has one week from the order to send the written correction, with Schultz’s order attached, to everyone who received the memo. Still open is whether ICE will withdraw or expunge O’Neal’s memo from its own internal files — the judge’s orders so far have governed the copies prosecutors distributed — and whether the government will offer the formal apology Deates’s lawyer has demanded. The underlying conspiracy case against the 15 Minnesota defendants, in which the memo mistakenly appeared, continues separately.