Republican-appointed judge: Trump DOJ 'a grave threat to the rule of law'

Republican-appointed Judge Patrick J. Schiltz of the United States District Court for the District of Minnesota served as chief justice when the state exploded into protests and federal agents opened fire on citizens. His loyalty to President Donald Trump, however, hasn't matched that of some of his conservative counterparts.

In an extensive interview with The New York Times, Schiltz said he has a serious concern about the administration's "disregard for court orders" and fears that the Justice Department is "clogging his courthouse" to the point that they can't get anything accomplished. It's such a huge problem that he fears it's "putting the constitutional order at risk."

It has “created a grave threat to the rule of law," he said in a 90-minute interview along with six other members of Minnesota’s federal bench appointed from both Democratic and Republican presidents.

“I would say aloud to myself, ‘This just never happens,’” he said about the orders that were violated by the Justice Department.

Legal affairs reporter Mattathias Schwartz noticed in Schiltz's chambers signed photos of Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, whom the Minnesota judge clerked for.

Schiltz served as the district’s chief judge from mid-2022 through June 2026, spending months navigating "a deteriorating relationship with the Justice Department and a flood of lawsuits that combined to put their court under tremendous pressure," the Times said.

The courthouse was a mess, Schiltz and his fellow judges agreed, with 1,116 petitions from detainees seeking release, the report explained. In January alone, federal immigration authorities violated nearly 100 orders.

Other judges, including Trump appointees, also intervened. Judge Nancy Brasel, who was appointed by Trump in 2018, was pushed to order that detainees had constitutional rights, including access to lawyers.

“Due process is not a game of keep-away," she said in one order.

Judge Eric Tostrud, another judge appointed by Trump in 2018, held the government's feet to the fire, demanding at one point that they must preserve evidence related to one of the civilian killings.

Tostrud has recently taken over as the chief after Schiltz took a kind of semi-retirement known as "senior status," the Times explained.

Behind the scenes of the judges' conflicts with the DOJ, they were also facing "a deluge of violent threats," they said.

Any time there was a major ruling their phones in the chambers would "sometimes ring nonstop." Clerks logged calls from hundreds of people coming in daily. Judge Jerry W. Blackwell, appointed by President Joe Biden, shared an emailed thread reading "kill u soon."

The court was ultimately moved to craft its own internal system for tracking people who issue multiple threats to aid the U.S. Marshals Service, which oversees security for federal judges.

Over the course of several months, U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen's office was in disarray. Blackwell said that he was hemorrhaging lawyers and career staffers who wanted no part of the DOJ's mess. At one point they were so desperate for lawyers that the Pentagon sent folks in to help. One famously melted down, saying that the job "sucks" and the system was “broken.”

"And I am trying every breath that I have so that I can get you what you need,” prosecutor Julie Le told the judge at the time after she was asked why his orders were being ignored. “Sometimes I wish you would just hold me in contempt, your honor, so that I can have a full 24 hours of sleep."

What appeared to be broken, she alleged, is that ICE would arrest people or detain migrants and then ignore the DOJ when they had to appear in court.

“Fixing a system, a broken system, I don’t have a magic button to do it. I don’t have the power or the voice to do it,” she said.

The DOJ ultimately fired her.

She wasn't the only one dealing with the huge influx, however. Court employees were working 16-hour days, seven days a week, without overtime pay, while judges constantly monitored devices for emergency filings. Judges developed shared templates and informal systems to manage the workload, worried that delays could result in detainees being transferred out of state before courts could intervene.

Ultimately, Judge Schiltz issued an order in January warning the feds: “ICE is not a law unto itself."

Looking back, he said, “My impression was that most, if not all, of the noncompliance was due to incompetence, not due to conscious defiance of orders."

It became clear that the violations came as a result of a lack of resources that the federal government should have anticipated. Those violations, he argued, should be taken seriously because such mistakes threaten the foundations of the legal system.

Following the laws, whether a prosecutor or a defendant, is why people feel safe, he argued.

“You walk down the street, and you assume you’re generally safe because of the law,” he said. “It’s the rule of law. If you don’t have it, you have either anarchy or you have authoritarianism. You have Russia or you have China or you have North Korea.”

The report concludes that Minnesota’s judges saw the surge as more than an immigration dispute. They believed routine government compliance with court orders was essential to democratic stability. As Schiltz put it, without the rule of law, a country risks either “anarchy or authoritarianism.”