The Justice Department is demanding that two Minnesota federal judges recuse themselves from ongoing immigration cases after they gave recent interviews to The New York Times, Bloomberg Law reported on Wednesday, October 21.
Source: Bloomberg Law
Remarks that Senior Judges Patrick Schiltz and John Tunheim gave to the newspaper about government lawyers violating court orders during the Trump administration's immigration surge in Minnesota “unquestionably calls into doubt whether they can be impartial in these cases,” the department wrote in a post on X on Wednesday, sharing screenshots of each recusal motion, Bloomberg Law reported.
Source: Bloomberg Law
Both requests were filed on Tuesday by Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, the third-highest-ranking official at the Justice Department, in two separate cases in the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota, The New York Times reported.
Source: The New York Times (via Winneba News)
In the case overseen by Schiltz, the administration is seeking to strip a Minnesota man of his U.S. citizenship. In the second case, assigned to Tunheim, a South African national faces two charges of illegally voting in the 2024 election and has pleaded not guilty, according to the Times.
Source: The New York Times (via Winneba News)
Schiltz has scheduled a hearing on the motion against him for November 23. Under judicial ethics rules, judges cannot publicly discuss cases pending before them — the principle the department says the interviews breached.
Source: The New York Times (via Winneba News)
The motions are an escalation of the department's campaign against judges it says have treated the administration unfairly. Over the weekend, Woodward also moved to disqualify U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes in Washington, D.C., from a case involving the president's efforts to overhaul a historic public golf course; Reyes rejected that effort on Sunday and accused the department of weaponizing selective quotations to bring a baseless recusal motion, the Times reported.
Source: The New York Times (via Winneba News)
A recusal motion does not remove a judge by itself: the judge concerned, or the court, must decide it. No ruling on the Minnesota motions had been reported as of Wednesday afternoon.