Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward has asked two Minnesota federal judges to leave immigration cases after comments they made about the Trump administration's crackdown.
Woodward, the Justice Department's third-highest-ranking official, filed separate recusal requests Tuesday against U.S. District Judges Patrick Schiltz and John Tunheim. He argued their remarks to the New York Times last month created an appearance of bias in cases tied to the administration's immigration push in Minnesota.
CBS News reported that the department says the comments go to the heart of whether those judges can fairly handle denaturalization and illegal-voting prosecutions now before them.
Schiltz is overseeing a case in which the administration seeks to strip a Minnesota man of U.S. citizenship. Tunheim is assigned a case against a South African national charged with two counts of illegally voting in the 2024 election. She has pleaded not guilty.
Woodward signed the motions himself. The department also promoted the filings on social media.
In the filing aimed at Schiltz, Woodward tied the judge's public stance directly to one of the department's central immigration projects.
"A judge who has publicly taken sides on the political issue of immigration enforcement cannot then preside over a case concerning one of the Justice Department's key immigration initiatives: pursuing the largest denaturalization effort in Department history to restore trust and integrity in U.S. citizenship,"
Woodward wrote. He added that without recusal, "the American people will reasonably question whether Judge Schiltz can be impartial regarding this important matter defending the integrity of American citizenship."
On Tunheim, Woodward was just as direct.
"To Judge Tunheim, the 'rule of law' apparently means ignoring the law when it comes to illegal aliens who have broken the law,"
the associate attorney general wrote. He said the judges' statements and their participation in the Times article "give rise to the appearance of bias in immigration-related cases."
Schiltz has set a hearing on the motion against him for Nov. 23.
The Times piece last month featured comments from both judges about the Trump administration's handling of cases that grew out of Operation Metro Surge, the immigration enforcement effort in Minnesota earlier this year.
Federal ethics rules bar judges from publicly discussing cases pending before them. The department has treated the judges' decision to speak about the broader crackdown as a problem for any immigration matter that lands on their dockets.
Last month the Justice Department also filed a judicial misconduct complaint against all but one of the federal judges in Minnesota over the same Times article. That step put nearly the entire Minnesota federal bench under formal scrutiny for speaking out about enforcement policy.
Law professors who study judicial ethics offered a different reading. They cast the motions as part of a wider effort to weaken public trust in judges who rule against the administration.
Stephen Gillers of New York University said the department's approach is deliberate.
"It's obvious DOJ has decided that its game plan is to challenge the fairness of the judges as a way of undermining judicial authority in the eyes of the public,"
Gillers said. He called the filings "performative" and said the department "wants to publicize them to discourage public confidence in what the courts are doing when they rule against the administration."
Charles Geyh of Indiana University Bloomington described the same pattern in sharper terms. "They're looking to essentially antagonize the judges and to square off against them in some manner," he said. He called the Minnesota motions "just a perpetuation of the project" and "part of the network of efforts to delegitimize the judges involved, make them look partisan, make them look biased as a way to quiet them and diminish the check from the judiciary."
Geyh also argued that general comments about the rule of law cut the other way. "If you're talking generally about the concerns with the rule of law as a consequence of the general pattern of conduct the Department of Justice is exhibiting, it's the opposite of bias," he said. "It is them really doing what they need to do to protect the rule of law."
Those are the professors' claims. The department's claim is simpler: a judge who has already gone public against immigration enforcement should not then decide the government's key immigration cases.
In February, the Judicial Conference, the policy-making body for the federal courts, issued an advisory opinion on what judges may say in public. Ethics principles "permit judges to speak or write about the independence of the judiciary, or advocate for the rule of law in general, including why both values are crucial to our system of government," the opinion said.
The Conference's Committee on Codes of Conduct also said there is "room, in at least some circumstances, for the measured defense of judicial colleagues from illegitimate forms of criticism and attacks that risk undermining judicial independence or the rule of law, whether or not they rise to the level of persecution."
That guidance protects general defense of the courts. It does not erase the separate rule against discussing pending cases. Nor does it answer Woodward's core point about appearance of bias when the same judges who criticized the immigration crackdown are later asked to rule on denaturalization and illegal-voting charges born of that crackdown.
The Minnesota filings were not isolated. Over the weekend Woodward moved to disqualify U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes from a Washington, D.C., case involving President Trump's efforts to overhaul a historic public golf course in the capital.
Reyes rejected that effort Sunday. She accused the Justice Department of weaponizing "selective quotations to bring a baseless recusal motion."
The department has also submitted ethics complaints against Reyes and against U.S. District Judge James Boasberg. The Boasberg complaint was dismissed. In another front, the department sued all 15 federal judges in Maryland over a standing order that temporarily blocked the immediate removal of immigrants challenging deportation. A Virginia judge dismissed that lawsuit. The department appealed.
Taken together, the moves show a department unwilling to treat every adverse courtroom setting as untouchable. Citizenship stripping, illegal voting, and removal policy are not abstract disputes. They go to whether American citizenship still means something and whether election laws apply to everyone.
Woodward's Minnesota motions put that conflict on the record in plain language. Judges who volunteer public criticism of immigration enforcement, then keep the very cases that test that enforcement, invite the question the filings raise. Taxpayers and lawful citizens are entitled to a bench that has not already chosen a side.
