A federal judge once warned that ICE is "not a law unto itself."
Now we find out his court wasn't exactly operating on its own either.
Minnesota's federal judges got caught running a secret email chain to fight Donald Trump’s immigration operation.
What the Email Chain Actually Reveals
Seven Minnesota federal judges sat down with The New York Times and revealed that while handling over 1,400 immigration detainee cases stemming from Operation Metro Surge, they had built an entire shadow coordination system.
Informal spreadsheets identifying which judge to consult on which legal question.
Pre-built templates to crank out orders faster when the same detention dispute kept landing on their dockets.
Running email threads connecting judges across cases they were each supposed to be deciding independently.
The district went from 12 alien-detainee habeas petitions in all of 2024 to 1,427 through August of this year.
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Robert Luther III, a professor at George Mason University's Antonin Scalia Law School, called it something he'd never seen before.
"The idea of a running email chain involving a variety of cases – it strikes me as very weird and frankly unprecedented," Luther told Fox News Digital.
He made clear that judges consult colleagues all the time on procedural or evidentiary questions.
That's not what this was.
"Templates for substantive matters – that seems like something altogether different," Luther said.
Each judge is legally responsible for independently deciding the cases assigned to them.
The key question nobody has answered yet: what was actually in those emails?
DOJ Calls It Collusion and Raises Recusal Questions
DHS General Counsel James Percival didn't mince words.
He accused former Chief Judge Patrick Schiltz of "essentially conspiring with his judicial colleagues" to stop federal immigration enforcement.
Schiltz – who sat for a 90-minute Times interview before taking senior status this summer – had already made himself the face of judicial resistance to Trump's Operation Metro Surge.
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In January, he accused ICE of violating nearly 100 court orders in a single month and warned that "ICE is not a law unto itself."
The DOJ's response was pointed: "It is remarkable that sitting federal judges are giving on-the-record interviews attacking this Administration's policies rather than ruling from the bench."
Then they went further.
The Justice Department suggested that judges who made public comments on pending or related matters "should consider whether recusal is warranted going forward."
That is not a subtle hint.
Judges Defend the Arrangement But Won't Show the Emails
Current Chief Judge Eric Tostrud pushed back on the collusion framing.
He told Fox News Digital that every judge independently decided the merits of each petition assigned to them – and that judges actually reached different outcomes on certain legal questions.
"The bottom line is that each of us made an independent decision with respect to the merits of each and every petition we were assigned," Tostrud said.
But he refused to disclose what the emails actually said.
The internal working materials, he told Fox News Digital, "are not public."
And when asked what was in any of it, the answer is: you don't get to know.
One Trump appointee on the bench – Judge Nancy Brasel – defended the judges' right to give public interviews about judicial independence.
Luther disagreed.
"Judges should be speaking through their judicial orders, not through their surrogates at The New York Times," he said.
This Is What a Coordinated Resistance Looks Like
What happened in Minnesota wasn't chaos – it was organized.
The DOJ reviewed the nearly 100 ICE-order violations Schiltz flagged in January and found that detainees were released on time in the large majority of those cases – meaning no actual violation had occurred.
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In most of the remaining cases, the administration did what the court ordered, just not by every deadline.
Schiltz's list generated weeks of national media coverage.
It was largely resolved before anyone was paying attention.
Federal judicial ethics rules prohibit judges from publicly commenting on pending or impending cases – but permit speaking about the administration of justice generally.
Democrats and their media allies will say these judges were just managing an overwhelming workload and protecting judicial independence.
These judges built a machine to rule against Trump before the cases ever arrived.
When Trump's DOJ starts raising recusal questions, they're not being paranoid.
They're reading the record.
Sources:
- Alec Schemmel, "'Unprecedented': Judges reveal behind-the-scenes coordination on Trump immigration cases," Fox News, September 18, 2026.
- "Habeas Cases Flood Courts After Immigrant Detention Shift," Law360, 2026.
- "Rising immigration-related caseload is 'not sustainable,' federal judges say," ABA Journal, 2026.
- Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, "Attorney General Ellison defends Metro Surge lawsuit from DOJ's motion to dismiss," Office of the Minnesota Attorney General, September 10, 2026.
