The Justice Department Demands Obedience from Minnesota Judges

There is an unctuous brand of authoritarian insolence that genuinely mistakes judicial independence for treason. We have arrived at the stage of administrative degeneration where the Department of Justice, staffed at its highest levels by courtier-attorneys, treats a judge’s refusal to act as an executive rubber stamp as proof of disqualifying malice.

On Tuesday, Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward Jr., the department’s number-three official, filed formal motions demanding that two federal district judges in Minnesota recuse themselves from immigration-related proceedings. The target in the first instance is US District Judge Patrick J. Schiltz, whom the government wishes to remove from a civil action seeking to strip a Somali American man of his citizenship. In the second, Woodward demands that US District Judge John R. Tunheim abandon the criminal prosecution of Hester Sophia Weihmann, a South African national charged with illegal voting. The crime committed by both jurists, according to Woodward’s motions, was daring to speak to The New York Times about the administrative ruin visited upon their courthouses by the administration’s enforcement blitz, known as Operation Metro Surge.

Woodward insisted in his filing that Tunheim’s participation in the newspaper report did, at a minimum, give rise to the appearance of bias in immigration-related cases. Three weeks earlier, in an official blast that read less like the considered judgment of a legal officer than the press release of an enraged palace guard, Woodward had announced that judges in Minnesota had abandoned their duties to launch a partisan press campaign and advance their policy preference, allowing criminal illegal aliens to run free in Minnesota.

Examine the record before you accept the department’s melodrama. During the winter of 2026, the administration descended upon Minneapolis and Saint Paul with an indiscriminate dragnet that jammed the federal docket with roughly one thousand habeas corpus petitions. In January 2026 alone, federal judges in the district documented ninety-six separate instances in which immigration agents simply ignored binding judicial orders. Prisoners were shuffled between black holes and out-of-state holding pens before magistrates could rule on the legality of their detention.

Confronted with this systematic lawlessness, Schiltz did what any jurist with a pulse and an ounce of fidelity to Article III must do: he said so. As Schiltz observed in a January ruling, Immigration and Customs Enforcement is not a law unto itself. When he subsequently spoke to The New York Times for its September 17, 2026, report, he noted that the administration’s contempt for judicial decrees had created a grave threat to the rule of law. Tunheim made the equally pedestrian observation that agents sweeping the Twin Cities weren’t arresting, in my view, people who were dangerous criminals on the street.

To the legal minds currently directing the Justice Department, stating that a police agency broke the law ninety-six times is tantamount to joining the opposition party. Attorney General Todd Blanche, who along with Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter and Woodward previously demanded that Chief Judge Steven Colloton of the US Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit impose blanket disqualifications on seven Minnesota judges, framed the matter as an ethical collapse. Judges, Blanche asserted, undermine public confidence whenever they discuss matters that touch executive prerogatives.

This argument is as fraudulent as it is cowardly. It trades on Canon 3A(6) of the Code of Conduct for United States Judges, which cautions against evaluating the merits of unresolved cases, while deliberately erasing the February 2026 advisory opinion from the Committee on Codes of Conduct. That committee confirmed what common sense requires: judges retain the right, and indeed the professional obligation, to speak out when the administration of justice and judicial independence are imperiled. Schiltz made the distinction plain when speaking at the University of St. Thomas School of Law on October 2, 2026: As a judge, it’s none of my business whether people get deported or not. It is my business to make sure that before somebody is put on a plane to Texas . . . that their rights are quickly addressed and that they are heard and that’s what we were doing.

Consider, too, the ideological pedigree of the jurist the department now smears as an ideological insurgent. Schiltz is no fiery partisan of the left; he was appointed by President George W. Bush in 2006 after serving as a law clerk to Antonin Scalia. But totalitarian impulses cannot tolerate the traditional conservative reverence for institutional procedure any more than they can tolerate radical dissent. What the executive branch demands is not impartiality, but complicity.

This bullying routine is already fraying. On October 18, 2026, US District Judge Ana Reyes in Washington rejected an identical recusal gambit by Woodward, scathingly noting that the Justice Department had seized upon selective quotations to bring a baseless recusal motion. Schiltz has scheduled a hearing on his own disqualification for November 23, 2026. Under federal statute, he will decide the motion himself, leaving the department to grovel before the Eighth Circuit for an emergency writ of mandamus if it wishes to persist in its tantrums.

The target of Woodward’s assault is not the personal integrity of two judges in Minneapolis. It is the very principle that a bureaucrat wielding a deportation order must answer to a magistrate holding a copy of the Constitution. When an executive agency begins treating the enforcement of the law as an act of intolerable prejudice, the republic is being invited to surrender its courts to the police.