The Department of Justice has set a deadline for the Department of Health and Human Services to reunite children who have been separated from their families after crossing into the US.
What happens if the deadline is missed? Does the DOJ assess a fine against DHHS? Do officials and/or front-line employees of HHS start serving jail time for contempt of court?
I don’t believe the Department of Justice has set such a deadline, nor that it has the power to do so. What’s happened is a Federal judge has set a deadline. I.e. an article three court, not an article two executive agency.
Technically if the agencies involved fail to meet it, the judge could hold agents of said agency in contempt of his ruling. That could lead to fines/arrest in a typical case. Procedurally this wouldn’t mean as much as you might imagine in the case of a government agency, the judge doesn’t have the power to actually arrest anyone–he can only order an arrest, and it would be Federal law enforcement who would attempt to execute that order, presumably the political appointees who control these agencies would simply order them not to do so. But the judge isn’t going to ask that anyone be arrested in any case, he’s going to insist they keep working to meet the order as fast as they can.
The only time I think you’d see a judge go after officials with arrest warrants for contempt in a situation like this is if it was patently obvious the officials were not remotely attempting to comply with the order in good faith.