Courthouse Coup, Minnesota Style

In a recent interview with the New York Times, Patrick Schiltz--the former chief judge of the Minnesota district court--described a collective effort to block the administration’s deportation plans.

Like all dignified coups, it began with a lunch.

In correspondence to his higher-up last January, Patrick Schiltz, the chief judge of the federal district court in Minnesota at the time, said he planned to host an emergency lunch meeting with his judicial colleagues the following week. The purpose of the get together, Schiltz claimed in a letter to the chief judge of the appellate court, was to discuss the Department of Justice’s request that he overrule a Minneapolis magistrate judge’s decision to deny several arrest warrants related to the storming of Cities Church that month; one of the warrants the magistrate judge—whose wife is a top aide to Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison—refused to sign was for former CNN host Don Lemon.

Schiltz, however, balked at reversing the decision, insisting Lemon and the others had not “committed any acts of violence” despite video evidence to the contrary. Feigning uncertainty that he had authority to overrule the magistrate (he did), Schiltz said he would “discuss the issue with my colleagues” at a January 27 lunch meeting.

But it now appears that more than turkey sandwiches and hot tea were on the menu that winter afternoon. In a lengthy—-and unprecedented—interview with the New York Times published yesterday, Schiltz seems to admit that he had summoned his colleagues to instead scheme over how to sabotage the government’s deportation efforts related to Operation Metro Surge. And regardless of one’s views of that operation—I wrote at the time that the Department of Homeland Security should abandon the effort given entrenched public, political, and judicial resistance and the death of two anti-ICE protesters—it’s hard to view Schiltz’s latest disclosures as anything other than a coordinated judicial plot to undermine what is largely the sole purview of the executive branch: to carry out the removal of migrants here illegally.

Another Day, Another Contempt Trap Set by Activist Judge

In fact, the day after the judicial luncheon ostensibly to get advice on how to proceed in the Lemon matter, Schiltz filed a headline-making order that accused Immigration and Customs Enforcement of having violated nearly 100 court orders in Minneapolis since the start of the new year. Here is the telltale from Schiltz: “The list was hurriedly compiled by extraordinarily busy judges,” Schiltz revealed in a January 28 order, which threatened to bring contempt charges against ICE officials. That means the list— I debunked several of the alleged violations here—was prepared in a matter of hours in a collective effort to deceive the public and bolster the notion the DOJ and DHS were systematically ignoring court orders

Schiltz continued. “ICE has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence,” he said, without evidence.

By following in the footsteps of DC Chief Judge James Boasberg, who had made false accusations that the DOJ violated his court order related to the return of suspected Tren De Aragua gang members in 2025, Schiltz’s claims of contempt furthered the view that the Trump administration was willfully defying court orders.

But in the Times interview, Schiltz backed off his click-bait allegations. “Judge Schiltz said that many of the government’s violations of his court orders appeared to be inadvertent, the result of sloppiness and a lack of legal staffing to accompany the immigration surge,” Times reporter Mattathias Schwartz wrote. (Nonprofit legal groups had flooded courts across the country with habeas petitions; the number surged from a handful in early 2025 to more than 1,000 in early 2026 in the Twin Cities.)

If You Are Married and Own a Home—Thank a Judge?

That tidbit represented only one of many eye-popping statements made by Schiltz in the 90-minute on-the-record interview. (The reporter, in fact, admitted an interview with a sitting judge was “unusual” and “rare.”) A clerk for late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia 40 years ago—a talking point often used by the media to give Schiltz, a George W. Bush appointee, undeserved conservative cred—the judge portrayed himself as part martyr, part victim, and part vanguard of democracy.

Tension between the administration and Minneapolis judges represented not a feature of democracy but instead “created a grave threat to the rule of law,” Schiltz said. “The rule of law to democracy is like oxygen to a human body. It is something that you absolutely need to survive, and yet it’s something that people just take for granted.”

Schiltz’s rantings about judicial power extended to basic rights and privileges enjoyed by all Americans. He told the Times that “obedience to court orders…is why people feel secure owning a home, saving money, getting married and having children. You walk down the street, and you assume you’re generally safe because of the law.” (One can safely assume Schiltz does not walk down the same streets that many Americans do.)

And then the kicker, a favorite of all anti-Trump actors. “It’s the rule of law. If you don’t have it, you have either anarchy or you have authoritarianism. You have Russia or you have China or you have North Korea.”

Quite the leap after he conceded most of the alleged mistakes were paperwork and manpower deficiencies rather than overt attempts to subvert the “rule of law.”

“Dear ______, You Are Free”

But Schiltz’s disclosures to the Times revealing how he and his colleagues collaborated--conspired?--to use the federal bench to cripple the executive branch calls out for further examination if not a DOJ or Congressional investigation.

“District court judges work alone, but as the number of cases ramped up, the judges recalled seeking one another’s counsel, meeting regularly and consulting in running email threads,” the Times reveleaed. “Eventually, some of their clerks made an informal spreadsheet showing whom to consult on particular legal questions. Some judges built templates of legal orders so they could respond quickly to some of the detention issues that were arising again and again.”

In other words, regardless of the individual nature of each habeas claim—which judges are required to consider independently— they instead created “go to” responses often issued with little to no input from the government.

Minneapolis judges “stayed glued to their devices, fearful of missing a petition,” the Times reported. “Judge Katherine M. Menendez said she responded to one request on her iPad from the coat room of a restaurant. At dinners with friends, Judge Schiltz said he would apologetically explain why he needed to check his phones constantly. ‘The cost of me enjoying a movie could be somebody waking up in New Mexico the next day when they shouldn’t have,’ he recalled.”

So much for judicial restraint.

The Times Forgot a Few Things…

I also noted here how judges had set intentionally unreasonable deadlines for responses from the DOJ related to the whereabouts of deportees. In addition to an historic flood of habeas petitions, prosecutors also were dealing with in some cases a 24-hour turn around time ordered by activist judges setting contempt traps for the DOJ. In fact, a ProPublica analysis found that Minnesota had one of the quickest habeas resolution timeframes in the nation, with a median time of 12 days versus several weeks in other busy jurisdictions.

“It is remarkable that sitting federal judges are giving on-the-record interviews attacking this Administration’s policies rather than ruling from the bench,” a DOJ spokeswoman told me via email. (Six other Minnesota judges also spoke with the Times.) “If judges followed the law in adjudicating cases, there wouldn’t be an ‘overwhelming’ habeas caseload. Judges who have made public comments on pending or related matters should consider whether recusal is warranted going forward.”

And while the Times ran a lot of interference for Schiltz, it did omit some relevant information. For example, the Times failed to note that Schiltz is a longtime supporter and donor of a Minnesota nonprofit that provides legal assistance to undocumented migrants.

Or that Schiltz took the extraordinary step—which is not so extraordinary these days—of quashing DOJ subpoenas targeting top Minnesota officials over their involvement in organized protests. “The dominant purpose of the challenged subpoenas is to coerce Minnesota officials into assisting the federal government with enforcing civil immigration law and to harass and retaliate against them for failing to do so,” Schiltz wrote in June. “No community should be expected to accept harmful policies without objection. And no administration should use the tools of law enforcement to silence dissent.”

One thing we know is that Judge Schiltz does not suffer in silence. The question now remains--what should, or will, be done about such an egregious act of judicial overreach by an entire federal bench.