A judge with deep ties to the conservative legal establishment has blasted the Trump administration for creating “a grave threat to the rule of law” during its violent immigration crackdown in Minneapolis earlier this year.
Judge Patrick Schiltz was the chief judge for Minnesota’s Federal District Court during “Operation Metro Surge,” President Donald Trump’s mass deportation drive that resulted in thousands of arrests and the deaths of two U.S. citizens at the hands of federal immigration agents.
By late January, hundreds of undocumented immigrants had filed habeas corpus petitions challenging their detentions, leading to a flurry of legal rulings—including orders to release many of the detainees, The New York Times reported.
But Immigration and Customs Enforcement violated nearly 100 of those court orders in just one month, the Times reported.
In a rare interview, Schiltz—who was appointed in 2006 by President George W. Bush—told the Times the violations had brought court business to a halt, enflamed tensions between protesters and ICE agents, and put the entire legal system at risk.
The 66-year-old formerly clerked for the late conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, and keeps signed photos of Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Antonin Scalia in his chambers.
“I would say aloud to myself, ‘This just never happens,’” he told the Times.
Most of the disregard for court orders seemed to be “due to incompetence, not due to a conscious defiance of orders,” he added.
But in his view, the Department of Justice should have known it didn’t have the resources to handle the surge—and should have taken the government’s noncompliance more seriously.
American society rests on the belief that court orders will be obeyed, Schiltz said.
“It’s the rule of law,” he told the Times. “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.”
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security responded to the criticism by telling the Times that DHS operates “in line with the U.S. Constitution and all applicable federal laws.”
A DOJ spokesperson also told the Times that her department “will continue to fully comply with court orders,” and that in most cases of noncompliance, “the underlying substance of the order was satisfied even where a secondary deadline was missed.”
The Daily Beast has also requested comment.
DOJ spokesperson Kiersten Pels also suggested to the Times that sitting federal judges should not give on-the-record interviews, and that they should recuse themselves if they’ve commented on “pending or related matters.”
Schiltz’s fellow federal judge Nancy Brasel, who was appointed by Trump in 2018, fired back that judges are “allowed to speak out about judicial independence, and so we should, in order to keep it.”
