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Minnesota judges’ internal coordination in Trump immigration cases sparks ethics debate
A New York Times report described emails, meetings and shared tools used by federal judges in Minnesota during a surge of habeas petitions. The disclosures prompted ethical questions and criticism from Donald Trump’s administration.
Federal judges in Minnesota used emails, meetings and internal tools to manage a wave of habeas petitions filed by immigrants detained during Donald Trump’s Operation Metro Surge, according to a report by The New York Times. The effort included ongoing email threads, an informal spreadsheet prepared by court staff to show which judges to consult on specific legal issues, and order templates meant to speed up repeated detention disputes.
The disclosures have fueled a debate over whether that coordination across separate cases compromised judicial independence or simply reflected an attempt to manage an extraordinary caseload. Robert Luther III, a professor at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School whose work includes federal courts and judicial ethics, told Fox News Digital that judges do regularly consult colleagues, especially on procedural or evidentiary matters, but said a running email chain spanning multiple cases struck him as unusual and unprecedented.
Chief Judge Eric Tostrud told Fox News Digital that the coordination did not affect the merits of individual rulings. He said every judge independently decided the petitions assigned to them and pointed to a dramatic rise in litigation, from 12 habeas petitions by immigrant detainees in all of 2024 to 1,427 through August of this year. He added that many petitions raised similar or identical, and often novel, legal questions, and said judges did not always reach the same outcomes.
According to The New York Times, Minnesota’s federal court received 1,116 habeas petitions in the first three months of 2026, compared with just two in the same period a year earlier. The newspaper also reported that court staff were working 16-hour days, seven days a week, to process the cases.
The episode also drew criticism from the Trump administration. Fox News Digital reported that Department of Homeland Security General Counsel James Percival accused former chief judge Patrick Schiltz of effectively working with judicial colleagues to hinder federal immigration enforcement. The Department of Justice separately questioned the decision by sitting judges to give lengthy on-the-record interviews about their experience during the immigration operation.
Seven judges from the district spoke to The New York Times, including Schiltz, who the paper said gave a 90-minute interview. The report said he declined to discuss ongoing cases but described what happened in Minnesota’s federal court as a grave threat to the rule of law.
A Justice Department spokesperson told Fox News Digital it was remarkable that sitting federal judges were publicly criticizing the administration’s policies rather than speaking through their rulings. The spokesperson also said judges who commented on pending or related matters should consider whether recusal may be appropriate in future cases.
Tostrud declined to disclose the contents of the court’s internal working materials, telling Fox News Digital that documents created by judges and court staff are not public. Luther told the same outlet that templates dealing with administrative matters are common in federal courts, but said the issue becomes different if templates touch the substance of a case.
The dispute is part of a broader clash between Minnesota’s federal bench and the Trump administration over Operation Metro Surge. Schiltz, who served as chief judge during that period before taking senior status this summer, had said in a Jan. 28 order that ICE violated nearly 100 court orders during that month and warned that the agency was not above the law.
The New York Times reported that most of those cases have now concluded and that the administration corrected many of the problems flagged by the court. The Department of Justice, however, said its own review found that in the large majority of the cases detainees were released on time and no violation occurred, and that in most of the remainder it ultimately complied with the court’s directives despite missing an additional deadline.
Federal judicial ethics rules generally bar judges from publicly commenting on the merits of pending or impending cases, though they may explain court procedures and speak more broadly about the law and the justice system. The New York Times reported that Judge Nancy Brasel, a Trump appointee who also took part in the interviews, defended judges’ ability to speak publicly about judicial independence. Luther, by contrast, told Fox News Digital that judges should speak through their orders rather than through outside intermediaries.
Sources
About this piece. Written by El Notero with AI assistance, from reporting published by the outlet cited above. El Notero did no original reporting on this story.
