A conservative federal judge appointed by former President George W. Bush has had enough of the Trump administration ignoring the law.
Chief Judge Patrick Schiltz of the U.S. District Court in Minnesota issued a blistering order on Thursday warning that he is prepared to pursue criminal contempt charges against ICE officials and the state’s top federal prosecutor if they continue defying court orders in immigration cases.
Criminal contempt can carry fines and even imprisonment for the officials responsible.
The order lays out an extraordinary pattern of lawlessness by the federal government. According to Schiltz’s accounting, ICE violated at least 97 court orders across 66 cases documented in a January review.
But that was just the beginning.
The judge’s new filing identifies an additional 113 order violations in 77 more cases — bringing the total to more than 200 violations of federal court orders in the span of roughly two months.
“The Court is not aware of another occasion in the history of the United States in which a federal court has had to threaten contempt — again and again and again — to force the United States government to comply with court orders.”
A Government That Attacked the Court Instead of Following the Law
When Schiltz first raised alarms about ICE’s noncompliance in January, the government’s response was not to fix the problem.
It was to attack the judge.
In a February 9 email to Schiltz, Minnesota’s U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen accused the court of being “far beyond the pale of accuracy” in its accounting of violations.
Rosen claimed his office reviewed a sample of just 12 out of the 74 originally flagged cases and found a high compliance rate.
He complained that the judges’ criticism was unfair to his attorneys.
Schiltz did not take kindly to that response. He ordered his judges and law clerks to go back and recheck every case.
They found some errors that “cut both ways,” but the final tally actually got worse for the government — not better.
The judge made clear that the administration’s strategy of disputing the numbers instead of obeying the law was exactly the wrong approach.
“The government’s response was not to do a better job complying with court orders, but instead to attack the Court,” Schiltz wrote.
3,000 Agents, Zero Legal Planning
At the heart of this disaster is Operation Metro Surge, the Trump administration’s massive immigration enforcement operation that flooded Minnesota with roughly 3,000 ICE agents beginning in December 2025.
The Department of Homeland Security called it “the largest DHS operation ever.”
The operation was launched based on unsubstantiated allegations, amplified by right-wing media, that Somali Minnesotans were funding terrorism through government program fraud.
But the results told a very different story.
Of the roughly 4,000 people arrested during the operation, only 23 were from Somalia. None had ties to the fraud cases under investigation.
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A federal judge found that the “overwhelming majority” of people ICE brought before him were lawfully present in the United States.
The human toll has been devastating. Federal agents shot three people during the operation, killing two — including Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old American ICU nurse who worked for the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Agents racially profiled residents, detained legal immigrants and shipped them across state lines — including young children.
They deployed chemical irritants on public school property, smashed car windows of people observing the raids, and arrested journalists covering the operation.
And through all of it, the administration made no legal provisions for the tsunami of habeas corpus petitions and lawsuits that would inevitably follow.
Schiltz placed the blame squarely on Rosen and his superiors at the Department of Justice.
He acknowledged that the government attorneys in the courtroom had been “put in an impossible position” by their own leadership.
But he saved his sharpest words for the planning failure itself.
“What those attorneys ‘didn’t deserve’ was the Administration sending 3,000 ICE agents to Minnesota to detain people without making any provision for handling the hundreds of lawsuits that were sure to follow,” Schiltz wrote.
An Office in Collapse
The chaos has gutted the U.S. Attorney’s office in Minnesota. Multiple federal prosecutors have resigned over the Justice Department’s handling of Operation Metro Surge cases.
Some left after DOJ leadership declined to open a constitutional investigation into the operation’s civil rights violations, a decision that also prompted resignations among prosecutors in Washington.
At a news conference on February 25 — his first since taking office in October — Rosen acknowledged that his staff has fallen dramatically.
At least two criminal cases have been dropped in recent days because the office simply doesn’t have enough lawyers to handle them.
The departures have left the office unable to keep up with the legal consequences of the very enforcement operation it was supposed to support.
What Criminal Contempt Charges Against ICE Would Mean
Civil contempt — which the court has already been using — is designed to pressure compliance through escalating consequences. Criminal contempt is a different beast entirely.
It’s a punitive measure meant to punish officials for willfully disobeying a court. It can result in fines or jail time for the individuals held responsible.
In one earlier case, Schiltz ordered ICE’s acting director, Todd Lyons, to appear personally in court to explain the agency’s noncompliance.
Lyons never showed, but the threat alone was enough to force ICE to release the detainee in question.
That case demonstrated something important: while the administration has been willing to ignore court orders on a systemic level, individual officials become far more cooperative when their own freedom is on the line.
A separate judge in the district has already scheduled a contempt hearing for Tuesday, ordering Rosen, his civil division chief, and ICE representatives to appear and explain why they have failed to return detained people’s personal property as ordered by the court.
The Rule of Law on Trial
What’s happening in Minnesota is not just an immigration story. It’s a test of whether the federal government is bound by the same laws it enforces on everyone else.
A conservative Bush-appointed judge is not using the language of criminal contempt because he’s a partisan. He’s using it because the Trump administration has left him no other choice.
Schiltz closed his order with a statement that should concern every American who believes that no one — not even the president’s enforcement apparatus — is above the law.
“This Court will continue to do whatever is required to protect the rule of law, including, if necessary, moving to the use of criminal contempt. One way or another, ICE will comply with this Court’s orders.”
