‘Unprecedented’: Judges reveal behind-the-scenes coordination on Trump immigration cases
Federal judges in Minnesota tasked with deciding a flood of habeas petitions challenging the detention of immigrants swept up during President Donald Trump's Operation Metro Surge weren't working entirely on their own — behind the scenes, they were regularly consulting one another through running email threads and developing tools to quickly handle recurring legal questions.
The behind-the-scenes coordination among Minnesota's federal bench, revealed in a New York Times report Thursday, included regular meetings, running email threads, an informal spreadsheet created by court clerks showing which judges to turn to with particular legal questions and templates some judges developed to quickly issue orders when similar detention disputes repeatedly came before the court.
The disclosures are fueling questions over whether the judges were colluding on separate cases involving the same Trump administration immigration policies, or simply sharing expertise to manage an extraordinary caseload.
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"The idea of a running email chain involving a variety of cases — it strikes me as very weird and frankly unprecedented," Robert Luther III, a professor at George Mason University's Antonin Scalia Law School whose work includes federal courts and judicial ethics, told Fox News Digital. Federal judges can and routinely do consult colleagues, Luther said, particularly about procedural or evidentiary questions. But each judge is ultimately responsible for independently deciding the cases assigned to them — a distinction Luther said makes the coordination significant.
The disclosures have also drawn criticism from the Trump administration on two fronts. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) General Counsel James Percival accused the former chief judge who led the district during Metro Surge of "essentially conspiring with his judicial colleagues" to thwart federal immigration enforcement. The Justice Department (DOJ), meanwhile, questioned the decision by sitting judges to give extensive on-the-record interviews about their experience with the administration's immigration operation.
Seven of the district's judges spoke to the Times for Thursday's report, including former Chief Judge Patrick Schiltz, who sat for a 90-minute interview about the court's experience during Metro Surge. Schiltz declined to discuss ongoing cases, according to the Times, but described what happened in Minnesota's federal court as having "created a grave threat to the rule of law."
"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."
But Chief Judge Eric Tostrud, who was himself among the Minnesota judges interviewed by the Times, rejected suggestions that the coordination described in the report compromised individual decision-making. He told Fox News Digital that every member of the bench independently decided the merits of each petition assigned to them, while pointing to an extraordinary surge in litigation — from 12 alien-detainee habeas petitions during all of 2024 to 1,427 through August of this year — and noting that many involved similar or identical, often novel, 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 told Fox News Digital.
Tostrud stressed that the judges did not uniformly reach the same conclusions, saying that while some reached the same result on certain legal questions, they "reached different outcomes regarding other legal questions." He said the judges' ability to communicate helped them resolve the cases quickly and thoughtfully, regardless of whether individual petitions were granted.
What exactly the judges were sharing behind the scenes, however, remains unclear. Tostrud declined to disclose the contents of the court's internal working materials, saying documents created by judges and court staff "are not public."
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That distinction could be significant, according to Luther, who said administrative templates are commonplace in federal courts, but drew a line between those and templates touching the substance of a case.
"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."
The coordination unfolded amid a broader clash between Minnesota's federal bench and the Trump administration over Operation Metro Surge. The dispute came as immigration litigation inundated the district. During the first three months of 2026, Minnesota's federal court received 1,116 habeas petitions, compared with just two during the same period the previous year, according to the Times. Court staff worked 16-hour days, seven days a week, to process the incoming cases.
Patrick Schiltz, who served as the district's chief judge during Metro Surge before taking senior status — a form of semi-retirement — this summer, emerged as a prominent judicial critic of the administration's handling of the operation. In a Jan. 28 order, Schiltz accused ICE of violating nearly 100 court orders during that month and warned that "ICE is not a law unto itself."
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The cases cited in Schiltz's January list of alleged violations have largely concluded, according to the Times, which reported that the administration ultimately corrected the issues flagged by the court in many of them.
DOJ said its review of the cases found that in the "large majority" of them, detainees were released on time and no violation occurred, while in most of the remaining cases the department said it ultimately did what the court ordered despite missing an additional deadline.
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Federal judicial ethics rules generally prohibit judges from publicly commenting on the merits of pending or impending cases, but permit judges to explain court procedures and engage in broader speaking and teaching about the law, legal system and administration of justice.
The DOJ argued that judges who publicly commented on pending or related matters should consider whether recusal is warranted. The Times reported, however, that Schiltz declined to discuss ongoing cases, while Judge Nancy Brasel, a Trump appointee who also participated in the interviews, defended judges' ability to speak publicly about judicial independence.
"We are allowed to speak out about judicial independence," Brasel told the Times. "And so we should, in order to keep it."
Luther, however, took a different view of the judges' decision to participate in the interviews.
"Judges should be speaking through their judicial orders, not through their surrogates at The New York Times," he told Fox News Digital.