DOJ looks to censure judges who spoke to the NYT about Minnesota ICE crackdown

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The Department of Justice submitted an ethics complaint Wednesday targeting federal judges in Minnesota over comments made to news media about the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.

The move intensifies the administration's clash with the federal judiciary, which has derailed executive priorities, tossed high-profile prosecutions, and admonished government lawyers in some cases for failing to comply with court mandates.

The department wants those judges disqualified from handling civil or criminal cases involving the Department of Homeland Security.

Attorney General Todd Blanche told reporters the demand follows "obvious bias they have shown" in remarks to The New York Times.

At issue is a September report in which seven Minnesota federal judges, nominated by Democratic and Republican presidents, discussed managing a surge of cases caused by last winter’s enforcement drive that yielded thousands of arrests.

One judge at the center of the report, Patrick Schiltz, accused the government in January of ignoring roughly 100 court orders, stating in a ruling that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an agency within DHS, "is not a law unto itself."

Schiltz, nominated by Republican President George W. Bush and a former law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, told the newspaper that the situation in Minnesota's federal court last winter "created a grave threat to the rule of law."

In a Wednesday statement, Schiltz insisted he was "acting well within the ethical rules that apply to federal judges in speaking to The New York Times."

He noted a February advisory opinion from the Committee on Codes of Conduct reaffirming that federal judges may speak or write "on core judiciary matters such as advocacy for the rule of law and judicial independence,'" stating: "That is exactly what I did."

The complaint was delivered to the chief judge of the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which supervises Minnesota federal courts.

The Republican administration frequently attacks what it calls "activist judges" supposedly intent on thwarting Trump’s agenda.

Yet some of the most critical and unfavorable court rulings have originated from jurists nominated by Trump and other Republican presidents.