The Trump administration on Monday bowed to increasing pressure to change up its immigration crackdown in Minneapolis, after a second person was killed by federal agents. The White House replaced Greg Bovino with Tom Homan on the ground and signaled a more cooperative tone with local Democrats.
But on Monday night, a Republican-appointed federal judge delivered a fresh reminder that the administration’s fast-and-loose approach isn’t going to stop giving it problems any time soon.
Patrick Schiltz, the chief US district judge in Minnesota, has become increasingly exasperated with the administration’s actions — and appears primed to be a thorn in its side.
He’s now taken the extraordinary step of summoning acting ICE Director Todd Lyons to court on Friday, threatening him with contempt ahead of what will surely be a much-watched hearing.
The hearing raises the prospect that a top federal official could be sanctioned for his agency’s failures to obey the courts. And at the very least, he’ll be forced to begin accounting for an extraordinary number of cases — more than 2,000, according to Politico’s Kyle Cheney — in which judges have ruled that ICE has illegally detained people.
And Schiltz’s actions in recent days suggest he’s ready to hold the administration’s feet to the fire in a way few other judges could — or would.
And while a judge’s personal politics and the president they were appointed by shouldn’t matter, in this case they very much do.
Schiltz was not only nominated by George W. Bush, but he’s a former clerk for the conservative icon, the late Justice Antonin Scalia. He becomes the latest Republican-appointed judge to cry foul about what the administration is doing.
And that undercuts the administration’s efforts to cast these rebukes as part of some kind of left-wing judicial “insurrection.”
In a court order, Schiltz cited “dozens of court orders with which respondents have failed to comply in recent weeks.”
He summoned Lyons over one specifically — a case in which Schiltz ordered that an immigrant be provided a bond hearing or be released by January 21. As of January 23, neither had happened.
Schiltz acknowledged his move was extraordinary, but he added that “the extent of ICE’s violation of court orders is likewise extraordinary, and lesser measures have been tried and failed.”
“The Court’s patience is at an end,” he added.
The judge also accused the administration of sending thousands of ICE agents to Minneapolis “to detain aliens without making any provision for dealing with the hundreds of habeas petitions and other lawsuits that were sure to result.”
The order follows a pair of letters Schiltz sent last week that featured similarly exasperated language, this time about people who were arrested for protesting at a St. Paul church where they claimed a pastor was a top local ICE official.
In that case, Schiltz derided what he cast as an effort by the Justice Department to ignore the usual process in order to bring charges in a politically charged case.
A magistrate judge found there was no probable cause to charge five of the eight people DOJ wanted to charge, including former CNN anchor Don Lemon, who has said he was acting in his capacity as a journalist. The DOJ quickly asked for the district court to intervene. Schiltz said he surveyed a wide variety of colleagues, and everyone who responded could think of no precedent for such a request. Then when Schiltz didn’t rule fast enough, the DOJ sought the intervention of an appeals court, which ultimately declined.
In his letters, Schiltz cited “the defiance of several court orders by ICE, and the illegal detention of many detainees by ICE (including, yesterday, a two-year old).”
He wrote at one point: “The government has also argued that I must accept this as true because they said it, and they are the government.”
The judge also criticized the government for characterizing the situation as a national security-related emergency, noting it had declined to bring the cases to a grand jury that could have decided on charges quickly.
(The administration has failed to get grand juries to indict in a number of such politically charged cases in which the evidence appeared thin.)
Schiltz’s first letter, in particular, is remarkable.
CNN legal contributor Steve Vladeck wrote Sunday, before the judge summoned Lyons, that his letters were must-reads when it comes to understanding the Trump DOJ’s manipulation of the legal process.
“Were it not for Chief Judge Schiltz’s actions here, we might not know about any of this backstory — or, even worse, the Eighth Circuit might have simply acceded to the government’s entirely one-sided account of what happened and granted unprecedented relief,” Vladeck wrote.
He argued that other judges should lay these things bare just like Schiltz did. And now Schiltz’s summoning of Lyons puts these issues even more squarely in the spotlight.
On Friday, a judge with impeccable conservative credentials is set to hold an extraordinary hearing putting the top ICE official in a Republican administration on the spot about its disregard for court orders.
And it could be a big moment in an already bad week for the administration’s Minneapolis crackdown.
