Federal judges in Minnesota used meetings, continuing email discussions, clerk-created reference materials and order templates while handling more than 1,400 immigration detention petitions tied to Operation Metro Surge, prompting Justice Department criticism as the judges maintain that each case was decided independently.
By yourNEWS Media Newsroom
MINNEAPOLIS — Federal judges in Minnesota have disclosed that they communicated regularly with one another and developed shared tools while confronting an extraordinary increase in immigration detention cases arising from President Donald Trump’s Operation Metro Surge, setting off a dispute over where permissible judicial consultation ends and concerns about coordination in separately assigned cases begin.
The practices included meetings among judges, running email threads about recurring issues, an informal spreadsheet prepared by court clerks identifying judges familiar with particular legal questions and templates developed by some judges to speed the preparation of orders in similar cases, according to a New York Times account subsequently reported by Fox News.
What those emails, templates and other internal materials contained has not been publicly disclosed.
That unanswered question has become central to the controversy because consultation among federal judges is expressly contemplated by judicial ethics rules. The Code of Conduct for United States Judges states that judges may consult other judges and court personnel who assist them in carrying out adjudicative duties. The same rules require each judge to remain impartial and independently fulfill the responsibilities of the office.
Robert Luther III, a professor at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School whose work includes federal courts and judicial ethics, said consultation itself is not unusual but questioned the scale and form of the communications described in Minnesota.
“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.
Federal judges can routinely discuss procedural questions or seek colleagues’ views on legal issues, Luther said, while remaining responsible for deciding the cases assigned to them individually.
The disclosure has produced sharply different interpretations from the Trump administration and the Minnesota judges.
Department of Homeland Security General Counsel James Percival accused former Chief Judge Patrick Schiltz of “essentially conspiring with his judicial colleagues” to impede the administration’s immigration enforcement.
That characterization is the administration official’s allegation. Neither the reported coordination nor the existence of judicial consultations by itself establishes improper collusion, and the federal judicial code specifically recognizes consultation between judges as permissible.
The Justice Department separately focused on the decision by sitting judges to participate in on-the-record interviews about the court’s experience during Operation Metro Surge.
Seven judges from the District of Minnesota spoke with the Times, according to Fox News. Schiltz participated in a 90-minute interview but reportedly declined to address pending cases.
Schiltz characterized the events confronting the district as having “created a grave threat to the rule of law.”
The Justice Department questioned whether public comments from judges involved in related immigration litigation could raise recusal issues.
“It is remarkable that sitting federal judges are giving on-the-record interviews attacking this Administration’s policies rather than ruling from the bench,” a Justice Department spokesperson told Fox News Digital. “If judges followed the law in adjudicating cases, there wouldn’t be an ‘overwhelming’ habeas caseload. Judges who have made public comments on pending or related matters should consider whether recusal is warranted going forward.”
Federal judicial ethics rules prohibit judges from publicly commenting on the merits of pending or impending cases, but the prohibition contains exceptions for explanations of court procedures and certain discussions concerning the law and administration of justice. The code separately provides that judges should disqualify themselves when their impartiality might reasonably be questioned. Whether any specific Minnesota judge’s statements meet that standard has not been established by the disclosures.
Chief Judge Eric Tostrud rejected the suggestion that the judges collectively decided individual petitions.
“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.
He said the judges sometimes agreed about recurring legal issues but also “reached different outcomes regarding other legal questions.”
According to Tostrud, communication among judges allowed the district to process an unusually large number of cases more quickly while each judge retained authority over the merits of the matters assigned to that judge.
The size of the caseload was substantially different from previous years.
The district received 12 habeas petitions involving detained noncitizens during all of 2024, compared with 1,427 through August 2026, Tostrud said. During the first three months of this year alone, the Times reported that 1,116 habeas petitions were filed, compared with two during the same period in 2025. Court employees were working as long as 16 hours a day, seven days a week, to process the cases.
Many petitions raised recurring or closely related legal questions involving immigration detention, transfers and compliance with court orders.
It was against that backdrop that clerks reportedly created the internal spreadsheet and judges exchanged information through meetings and emails.
Tostrud declined to release the court’s internal working materials, saying documents prepared by judges and court staff “are not public.”
Without those materials, it remains unclear whether the order templates were primarily procedural tools or whether some contained substantive legal analysis or predetermined language concerning contested issues.
Luther said that distinction matters.
“Templates that deal with administrative matters strike me as entirely appropriate and commonplace in federal courts,” Luther said. “Templates for substantive matters — that seems like something altogether different.”
Federal ethics guidance provides some context for that distinction. Judges may consult with one another, and they are expected to administer cases efficiently, but the judicial code also emphasizes that judges must decide matters fairly, impartially and without being swayed by partisan interests or public pressure.
The coordination occurred during repeated confrontations between the Minnesota federal court and immigration authorities over implementation of Operation Metro Surge.
Schiltz, who served as chief judge during the operation before assuming senior status this summer, publicly criticized Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s compliance with court orders.
In a Jan. 28 order, Schiltz identified nearly 100 alleged violations of court directives during that month and wrote that “ICE is not a law unto itself.”
The administration later disputed the characterization of many of those incidents.
According to Fox News’ account of the Times reporting, most of the individual cases on Schiltz’s January list have since concluded, and the federal government ultimately addressed problems identified by the court in many of them.
The Justice Department said its own review found that detainees were released on schedule in the “large majority” of cases and that no violation occurred in those matters. In most of the remaining cases, DOJ said the government ultimately complied with the court’s instruction even when an additional deadline was missed.
The separate disagreement over judicial interviews raises another question: how much judges may publicly discuss a confrontation involving cases handled by their court.
Judge Nancy Brasel, a Trump appointee who participated in the Times interviews, defended judges’ ability to address broader questions involving the judiciary.
“We are allowed to speak out about judicial independence,” Brasel said. “And so we should, in order to keep it.”
The federal judicial code permits judges to speak and teach about the law, the legal system and administration of justice while restricting public statements about the merits of unresolved cases.
Luther argued that the Minnesota judges should have exercised greater restraint.
“Judges should be speaking through their judicial orders, not through their surrogates at The New York Times,” he said.
The disclosures therefore leave two related but distinct issues unresolved.
One concerns the internal coordination itself. Federal rules permit judges to consult colleagues, but the contents of the Minnesota court’s emails, templates and other shared materials have not been released, preventing an independent assessment of how far those exchanges extended into the substance of individual cases.
The second concerns the judges’ public comments. DOJ has raised possible recusal concerns, while participating judges say they discussed judicial independence and court administration rather than the merits of pending disputes.
For now, the public record establishes that Minnesota’s judges used shared communications and case-management tools while facing an abrupt increase from a handful of immigration habeas cases to more than 1,400. The judges say those measures helped them process recurring questions without surrendering independent decision-making; administration officials and outside critics are seeking greater scrutiny of both the coordination and the judges’ subsequent public comments.
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