Federal judges in Minnesota used running email chains, shared templates, and a clerk-built spreadsheet to manage immigration detention cases during Operation Metro Surge, coordination a legal expert called "very weird and frankly unprecedented."
Seven judges on the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota sat for on-the-record interviews with the New York Times, and former Chief Judge Patrick Schiltz gave the paper a 90-minute interview detailing how the court organized itself as habeas petitions from detained immigrants flooded the docket. Fox News Digital reported that the coordination included regular meetings among judges, informal spreadsheets created by court clerks identifying which judges to consult on specific legal questions, and templates some judges developed to issue orders quickly when similar disputes kept arriving.
The Trump administration wasted no time pushing back. DHS General Counsel James Percival accused Schiltz of "essentially conspiring with his judicial colleagues" to obstruct federal immigration enforcement. The Department of Justice questioned why sitting judges were giving media interviews instead of ruling from the bench, and suggested those who commented publicly on pending or related matters should consider whether recusal is warranted.
The numbers alone explain why the coordination drew scrutiny. Minnesota's federal court received just 12 alien-detainee habeas petitions during all of 2024. Through August of this year, that figure had surged to 1,427. During the first three months of 2026 alone, the court took in 1,116 habeas petitions, compared with two during the same period the previous year.
Court staff worked 16-hour days, seven days a week, to keep up with the incoming cases. No one disputes the workload was enormous. But the question is whether the court's response stayed inside the lines of ordinary case management, or crossed into something that compromised judicial independence.
Robert Luther III, a professor at George Mason University's Antonin Scalia Law School whose work covers federal courts and judicial ethics, told Fox News Digital the coordination raised serious concerns:
"The idea of a running email chain involving a variety of cases, it strikes me as very weird and frankly unprecedented."
Luther drew a sharp distinction between different kinds of shared templates. Administrative templates, standard procedural forms, are routine in federal courts, he said. But templates dealing with the substance of cases are a different matter entirely.
"Templates that deal with administrative matters strike me as entirely appropriate and commonplace in federal courts. Templates for substantive matters, that seems like something altogether different."
That distinction matters. If judges handling similar immigration cases were sharing substantive legal reasoning through templates and email threads, the premise of independent judicial decision-making starts to erode. Each petition is supposed to be decided on its own facts by the judge assigned to it, not shaped by a group consensus formed over email.
The former chief judge did not limit himself to behind-the-scenes coordination. On January 28, Schiltz issued an order accusing ICE of violating nearly 100 court orders during that month alone. "ICE is not [a law] unto itself," he wrote. He described what happened in Minnesota's federal court as having "created a grave threat to the rule of law."
The Justice Department pushed back on that characterization. DOJ said its own review of the cases Schiltz cited found that in the "large majority," detainees were released on time and no violation occurred. In most of the remaining cases, DOJ said it ultimately complied with court orders despite missing an additional deadline. The gap between Schiltz's sweeping accusation and DOJ's accounting raises its own questions about whether the court's framing of ICE's conduct was proportionate.
Across the country, federal courts have been central to the broader fight over immigration enforcement. In recent months, federal judges have lifted blocks on TPS terminations after the Supreme Court narrowed the scope of judicial review, a trend that has shifted the legal landscape in the administration's favor.
What makes the Minnesota situation unusual is not just the internal coordination. It is that seven judges then went to the New York Times to talk about it on the record. Federal judicial ethics rules generally prohibit judges from publicly commenting on the merits of pending or impending cases, though they do permit judges to explain court procedures and speak more broadly about the law and the administration of justice.
The DOJ spokesperson's statement to Fox News Digital made clear the administration views the interviews as a problem:
"It is remarkable that sitting federal judges are giving on-the-record interviews attacking this Administration's policies rather than ruling from the bench. 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."
That last line, the suggestion that recusal may be warranted, is not a throwaway. If the administration formally moves to disqualify judges who gave interviews from presiding over related immigration cases, it would open a new front in the already intense legal battles over enforcement. Meanwhile, federal appeals courts have rejected immunity claims by officials who interfered with ICE operations, signaling that courts elsewhere are drawing firmer lines around enforcement authority.
Judge Nancy Brasel, described as a Trump appointee, defended the decision to speak publicly. "We are allowed to speak out about judicial independence," she told the Times. "And so we should, in order to keep it."
Luther, the legal expert, was less sympathetic. He told Fox News Digital that the judges had the order backwards:
"Judges should be speaking through their judicial orders, not through their surrogates at The New York Times."
Current Chief Judge Eric Tostrud, who was among the judges interviewed by the Times, pushed back on the suggestion that coordination compromised the court's work. He told Fox News Digital that every judge made an independent decision on the merits of each petition assigned to them. He said judges "reached different outcomes regarding other legal questions" and that their ability to communicate helped them resolve cases "quickly and thoughtfully."
Tostrud declined to disclose the contents of the court's internal working materials, saying documents created by judges and court staff "are not public." That refusal leaves a significant gap. Without knowing what was in the email threads, the spreadsheet, and the templates, outside observers cannot assess whether the coordination stayed administrative or veered into substantive legal reasoning that should have remained independent.
The broader pattern of judicial involvement in immigration enforcement has played out in courtrooms nationwide. DHS has launched deportation flights after courts cleared legal obstacles to ending TPS protections for multiple countries, a sequence that underscores how much enforcement depends on which judges are handling which cases, and how they coordinate.
Several important questions remain unresolved. It is unclear whether any of the shared templates addressed substantive legal issues, the kind Luther flagged as "something altogether different" from routine administrative forms. It is also unclear whether any of the seven judges who gave on-the-record interviews are still presiding over pending cases related to Operation Metro Surge. No formal recusal motion has been reported.
The administration's response has been forceful but so far limited to public statements. DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin told Fox News Digital that Biden-appointed judges are "almost impossible" to work with as immigration enforcement battles intensify, though his comments were not elaborated upon in detail. Whether the DOJ moves beyond rhetoric, filing formal recusal motions or seeking disciplinary review, will determine whether this episode remains a political dispute or becomes a legal one.
Resistance to immigration enforcement has taken many forms in recent years, from local officials obstructing ICE operations to street-level confrontations. Federal courts have handed prison sentences to rioters who attacked law enforcement during anti-ICE protests, drawing a clear line around violent obstruction. The Minnesota judges' coordination is a different kind of resistance, quieter, institutional, and wrapped in the language of case management.
And that is precisely what makes it harder to confront. When a protester blocks an ICE van, the law is clear. When judges share email threads, templates, and spreadsheets across dozens of related cases and then take their grievances to the New York Times, the mechanisms of accountability are murkier. Federal courts elsewhere have cleared DHS to proceed with enforcement actions, which makes the Minnesota court's posture stand out even more sharply.
Judges are supposed to be umpires, not a coordinated team running the same playbook. If Minnesota's federal bench wants to prove otherwise, the email threads and templates would be a good place to start.
