A top Justice Department official has asked two Minnesota federal judges to step aside from immigration cases after their public comments on Trump-era enforcement, arguing the remarks create an appearance of bias.
CBS News reported that Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward filed recusal motions Tuesday against U.S. District Judges Patrick Schiltz and John Tunheim in a pair of Minnesota immigration-related cases.
Woodward, the third-highest-ranking official at the Justice Department, signed the public docket filings himself. He pointed to comments the judges made last month to the New York Times about the Trump administration’s handling of immigration cases in the state, including the crackdown known as Operation Metro Surge earlier this year.
The filings put a simple question on the table: Can judges who have already spoken out on immigration enforcement still sit on cases that test that same policy?
One case before Judge Schiltz involves the administration’s effort to strip a Minnesota man of U.S. citizenship. Woodward described the broader push as the largest denaturalization effort in Justice Department history, aimed at restoring trust and integrity in American citizenship.
In the motion targeting Schiltz, Woodward wrote:
"A judge who has publicly taken sides on the political issue of immigration enforcement cannot then preside over a case concerning one of the Justice Department's key immigration initiatives: pursuing the largest denaturalization effort in Department history to restore trust and integrity in U.S. citizenship,"
He added that without recusal, “the American people will reasonably question whether Judge Schiltz can be impartial regarding this important matter defending the integrity of American citizenship.”
Judge Tunheim is assigned the case of a South African national who faces two charges of illegally voting in the 2024 election and has pleaded not guilty. Woodward’s filing on that case was no softer.
"To Judge Tunheim, the 'rule of law' apparently means ignoring the law when it comes to illegal aliens who have broken the law,"
The associate attorney general argued that the judges’ statements and their participation in the Times article “give rise to the appearance of bias in immigration-related cases,” and that recusal is warranted. Schiltz has scheduled a hearing on the motion against him for Nov. 23.
That focus on citizenship and election integrity fits a wider pattern of the department using court filings to force institutions to follow federal law, much as when the DOJ sued the University of Delaware over cheaper tuition for illegal immigrants than for out-of-state Americans.
The Minnesota motions were not an isolated step. Over the weekend, Woodward also moved to disqualify U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes in Washington, D.C., from a case involving President Trump’s efforts to overhaul a historic public golf course in the capital. Reyes rejected that effort on Sunday.
She accused the Justice Department of weaponizing “selective quotations to bring a baseless recusal motion.” The department had previously lodged an ethics complaint against Reyes as well.
Last month, after the Times article, the department filed a judicial misconduct complaint against all but one of the federal judges in Minnesota, including Schiltz and Tunheim. It has also pursued an ethics complaint against Judge James Boasberg that was later dismissed, and it sued all 15 federal judges in Maryland over a standing order that temporarily blocked immediate removal of immigrants challenging deportation. A Virginia judge dismissed that suit; the department appealed.
Those moves show an administration willing to press every lawful lever when it believes courts or other institutions are blocking enforcement. The same posture has shown up in other arenas, including when the Justice Department opened an antitrust probe into five TV networks over a White House pool halt.
Law professors who study judicial conduct offered a sharply different reading. Charles Geyh of Indiana University Bloomington said the department is looking to square off against the judges.
"They're looking to essentially antagonize the judges and to square off against them in some manner,"
Stephen Gillers of New York University said the strategy is plain. “It’s obvious DOJ has decided that its game plan is to challenge the fairness of the judges as a way of undermining judicial authority in the eyes of the public,” he said. Gillers called the filings “performative” and said the department “wants to publicize them to discourage public confidence in what the courts are doing when they rule against the administration.”
Geyh went further, describing the recusal push as part of a longer effort. “This is just a perpetuation of the project,” he said. “It’s part of the network of efforts to delegitimize the judges involved, make them look partisan, make them look biased as a way to quiet them and diminish the check from the judiciary.”
Both experts noted that the more common practice is a private letter asking a judge to consider stepping aside, not a public motion promoted on social media. The Justice Department did promote the Minnesota filings on its official account.
Federal ethics rules bar judges from publicly discussing cases pending before them. But a February advisory opinion from the Judicial Conference, the policy-making body for the federal courts, said ethics principles “permit judges to speak or draft about the independence of the judiciary, or advocate for the rule of law in general, including why both values are crucial to our system of government.”
The Committee on Codes of Conduct also said there is “room, in at least some circumstances, for the measured defense of judicial colleagues from illegitimate forms of criticism and attacks that risk undermining judicial independence or the rule of law, whether or not they rise to the level of persecution.”
Geyh argued that general comments about the rule of law in response to department conduct cut the other way. “If you’re talking generally about the concerns with the rule of law as a consequence of the general pattern of conduct the Department of Justice is exhibiting, it’s the opposite of bias,” he said. “It is them really doing what they need to do to protect the rule of law.”
Defenders of the judges cast the dispute as an assault on independence. The administration’s view is simpler: when judges give interviews that take sides on immigration enforcement, the public has every right to wonder whether the courtroom is still a neutral forum, especially in cases about stripping citizenship or illegal voting. That same insistence on equal application of the law has driven other department actions, including when the Justice Department sued four more jurisdictions over in-state tuition for illegal immigrants.
Schiltz and Tunheim have not been quoted in full in the public reporting on their Times remarks, and the exact wording of those comments remains outside the court filings’ excerpts. What is on the record is Woodward’s claim that the remarks took sides on enforcement and now sit beside live cases on denaturalization and illegal voting.
Reyes has already said no. Schiltz will hear argument on Nov. 23. Tunheim’s matter remains pending. Experts predict the Minnesota bids are likely to fail. Even so, the department has chosen the public docket over quiet letters, and it has tied the request to the appearance of fairness in some of the most sensitive immigration work it is doing.
President Trump has separately kept hardline pressure on figures he says undermine enforcement and national cohesion, including when Trump said Ilhan Omar could face jail or deportation. The judicial filings are a different tool, motions, not speeches, but they rest on the same premise that rules and borders mean little if the people applying them have already picked a team.
Courts only work if the public believes the referee has not already chosen a side. When immigration enforcement, citizenship, and election charges are on the line, that expectation is not a threat to the judiciary, it is the minimum the public should demand.