The Trump administration’s immigration enforcement tactics in Minneapolis last winter and its repeated defiance of court orders “created a grave threat to the rule of law,” a conservative federal judge in Minnesota told The New York Times in a rare interview.
Judge Patrick Schiltz, an appointee of George W. Bush who clerked for conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, made headlines in January when he issued a fiery order demanding that Todd Lyons, the director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement at the time, appear in court to explain why he should not be held in contempt after the government defied dozens of court orders.
In a 90-minute interview with the Times seven months later, Schiltz said that while he believed “most, if not all” of the government’s actions were due to “incompetence, not due to conscious defiance of orders,” the effects must not be underestimated.
If a country does not have “the rule of law,” Schiltz told the newspaper, “you have either anarchy or you have authoritarianism. You have Russia or you have China or you have North Korea.”
“The rule of law to democracy is like oxygen to a human body,” he added. “It is something that you absolutely need to survive, and yet it’s something that people just take for granted.”
In a statement provided to both The New York Times and MS NOW, Kiersten Pels, a spokesperson for the Justice Department, said it’s “remarkable that sitting federal judges are giving on-the-record interviews attacking this Administration’s policies rather than ruling from the bench.”
“Judges who have made public comments on pending or related matters should consider whether recusal is warranted going forward,” Pels added.
The Trump administration’s disrespect and disregard for court orders clogged the Minnesota U.S. district courthouse and “created a grave threat to the rule of law,” Schiltz told the Times.
“I would say aloud to myself, ‘This just never happens,’” he said during the interview conducted in his chambers, where, according to the Times, he displayed signed photos of Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito.
Pels also said that in many of the cases in question, “the underlying substance of the order was satisfied even where a secondary deadline was missed.”
Schiltz, who served as Minnesota’s chief federal trial judge from mid-2022 through June of this year, declined to discuss ongoing cases with the Times. But he and six other federal judges in his state agreed to speak about how their court was affected by the turmoil ICE officers brought to Minneapolis.
Judge Eric Tostrud, who was appointed by President Donald Trump and took over as chief from Schiltz, told The New York Times that Schiltz was “the perfect person to lead us” during the surge, describing him as “independent, brilliant, courageous. And not faint of heart.”
Another district judge, John Tunheim, who was appointed by Bill Clinton, told The New York Times the government “wasn’t arresting, in my view, people who were dangerous criminals on the street.”
The surge of ICE agents to Minneapolis led to massive protests, the deportation of more than 2,300 immigrants — and the fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, both 37-year-old U.S. citizens, by federal officers. The surge ended after the uproar over the killings.
Minneapolis has estimated that the surge cost the city $700 million. On Thursday, Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., introduced legislation that would redirect $140 billion allocated to ICE and Border Patrol through Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” to cites affected by surges of federal agents, including Minneapolis.
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