In the ongoing judicial contest to invent the most clickbaity comment accusing the Trump administration of lawlessness, Judge Patrick Schiltz, the chief judge of the District of Minnesota, last week rose to the top of a very crowded field of bench bloviators. “ICE is not a law unto itself,” Schiltz, an admitted donor to at least one pro-illegal immigration cause, wrote in a January 28 order related to a contempt hearing for the acting ICE director. “ICE has every right to challenge the order of this court, but, like any litigant, ICE must follow those orders unless and until they are overturned or vacated.”
Schiltz attached a three-page appendix listing nearly 100 court orders issued since the beginning of the new year as proof that ICE is a scofflaw of historic proportions. “ICE has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence,” Schiltz shockingly alleged. “This list should give pause to anyone–no matter his or her political beliefs–who care about the rule of law.”
The judge’s message was clear: either accept this list without question or you don’t care about the rule of law and whatnot.
Unsurprisingly, the media—including self-proclaimed “libertarian” outlets such as Reason—reported Schiltz’s allegations exactly how the good judge undoubtedly had hoped. The New York Times called Schiltz’s order “an extraordinary broadside” against the Trump administration. Politico said Schiltz had “delivered a brutal condemnation of the agency for repeatedly defying judges’ orders in cases stemming from the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota.”
An article in Reason, which breathlessly described the order as “a glimpse of a national campaign by the federal government to deprive detained immigrants of due process rights that an overwhelming majority of federal judges say they’re entitled to,” listed each case cited in Schiltz’s appendix—with an important caveat that most of the filings were archived on PACER, the online portal for all federal court documents and proceedings, for a fee.
Now, perhaps libertarians are just frugal—they, after all, do hate spending public money but do love cheap labor provided by illegal immigrants—or Reason writers are just too lazy to check even the first ten cases cited by Schiltz.
Had anyone at Reason, or at any news outlet reporting Schiltz’s accusations as fact, conducted a sample review of the cases on the list, they would have discovered what I did; most (none?) do not prove ICE’s “noncompliance” of court orders.
It Only Takes a Few Bucks and a Will Not to be Snookered by a Partisan Hack
In fact, the first court order on Schiltz’s list is nonexistent. He claimed a court order entered on January 24, 2026 represented the first example of ICE’s insubordination, however, no January 24, 2026 court order on the cited case can be found. It appears Schiltz was referring to a December 24, 2025 court order by Judge Jeffrey Bryan in a habeas case—but that obviously cannot apply to Schiltz’s allegations related to the month of January alone.
Schiltz also counted one court order twice in the first ten cases listed. Further, that particular Jan. 15, 2026 cannot be viewed because it is, conveniently, under seal. But regardless of the nature of the secret filing, the Jan. 15 order represented the first substantive order in that case. So how can ICE violate a court order in a case when it’s the very first one?
Another court order in the top ten on Schiltz’s list is nothing more than a slim order granting a habeas petition. Here it is:
Now, perhaps the judge—after deliberating for a whole week on all the weighty constitutional and statutory issues in this matter—indeed determined that the detention of this illegal immigrant violated the law, it nonetheless does not represent ICE’s violation of a court order.
Three cases in Schiltz’s top ten are being handled by Judge Jerry Blackwell, a Biden appointee. This week, Blackwell earned some media attention of his own when a government lawyer apparently suffered a breakdown of sorts in his courtroom over the excessive and unreasonable demands made by Minnesota judges in Operation Metro Surge. Blackwell, a lead prosecutor in the case against former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, reportedly berated Julie Le, a DHS attorney who had been detailed to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Minnesota to help with the enormous caseload, related to five habeas petitions before him on Tuesday. Blackwell raised Schiltz’s naughty list to Le and claimed he was “trying to fix this.”
But Blackwell apparently did not read Schiltz’ list either.
