The US Justice Department asked two Minnesota federal judges to step aside from cases on Tuesday. The move followed interviews the judges gave about immigration pressures. The department said, "Impartiality is imperative to ensuring public trust in our Nation's judiciary." The judges previously discussed court cases during a 2023 surge.
Oct 21 (Reuters) - The US Justice Department is seeking to have two Minnesota federal judges step aside from separate cases after they gave interviews to the New York Times about pressures their court faced as a result of the Trump administration's immigration crackdown in their state.
Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward made the recusal requests in a pair of court filings on Tuesday, a month after the Trump administration filed a related judicial misconduct complaint against US District Judges Patrick Schiltz and John Tunheim.
"Impartiality is imperative to ensuring public trust in our Nation's judiciary," the Justice Department said in a social media post on X announcing the motions.
Rebecca Parks, a spokesperson for the US District Court for the District of Minnesota, declined to comment, saying the judges could not comment on matters pending in the court. In a statement last month, Parks told Reuters that the judges had acted "well within the ethical rules that apply to federal judges in speaking to the New York Times."
The judges spoke to the newspaper for an article that was published on September 17 about the cases that flooded their court last winter during "Operation Metro Surge," which led to hundreds of immigration-related arrests in Minnesota.
Schiltz at the time of the surge was the district's chief judge. In an order in January, he took US Immigration and Customs Enforcement to task for violating nearly 100 orders during the surge as the court grappled with cases by people saying they were unlawfully detained.
The New York Times said that Schiltz, an appointee of Republican President George W. Bush, described why he issued that order and said what happened in his court "created a grave threat to the rule of law."
Woodward, the DOJ's third-highest ranking official, in one of Tuesday's motions, opens new tab cited that and other statements to argue that Schiltz had engaged in "a partisan critique of the Trump Administration's immigration enforcement."
He said the statements called the judge's impartiality into question and warranted his recusal from a case the department filed in May seeking to denaturalize Salah Osman Ahmed, who pleaded guilty in 2009 to providing material support to terrorists by supporting the militant group al Shabaab.
"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 US citizenship," Woodward wrote.
A hearing before Schiltz on the motion is scheduled for November 23.
Woodward made a similar request, opens new tab to have Tunheim, an appointee of Democratic President Bill Clinton, recuse himself from hearing a criminal case charging a South African woman with voting illegally and making a false claim of citizenship in order to vote.
The request cited Tunheim's statement to the newspaper that authorities during the surge "weren't arresting, in my view, people who were dangerous criminals on the street."
"That is not the law (or even about the law)," Woodward wrote. "But the law prohibits voting illegally. It also compels recusal when a judge's partiality might reasonably be questioned."
The cases in the US District Court for the District of Minnesota are US v Ahmed, No. 26-cv-02536, and US v Weihmann, 26-cr-175.