Minnesota Chief Judge in ICE Fight Seen as Steady Conservative

The chief judge of the Minnesota federal trial court rebuked the Trump administration’s approach to its sweeping immigration operation in court filings this week, adopting a sharp tone seen as out-of-character for a judge known to be even-tempered and conservative.

Chief US District Judge Patrick Schiltz, a George W. Bush appointee, didn’t mince words Monday in ordering the acting director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement to appear personally to show why he shouldn’t be held in contempt for repeatedly defying court orders on the release of detained immigrants.

The court “has been extremely patient” with the government, Schiltz wrote, but “the Court’s patience is at an end.” Schiltz also criticized government lawyers in filings unsealed last weekend for making what he suggested was a “frivolous” request for an appeals court to order a judge to issue arrest warrants related to a church protest.

The stern language is a departure for Schiltz, described by Minnesota lawyers as a seasoned, even-keeled, and “down-the-middle” jurist with conservative bona fides, including clerkships with Justice Antonin Scalia on both the DC Circuit and US Supreme Court, and a background in academia.

The responses may show the judge at the end of his rope, as he joins a growing chorus of judges who have expressed their frustration at the Justice Department’s conduct in court.

“He is not a short-fused, intemperate judge,” said B. Todd Jones, a former Minnesota US attorney during the Clinton and Obama administrations, who has known Schiltz for over two decades. “He’s very deliberate, very smart, very professional all the time, and it took a lot for him to get to that point.”

And to hear him use such sharp language indicates that he and the other Minnesota federal judges are “very concerned and unhappy of how the Department and the US attorney’s office have been conducting business over the past year,” Jones said.

Gene Schaerr, a prominent conservative lawyer who clerked alongside Schiltz for Scalia, said he didn’t think the chief judge was “over the top” in his order summoning the ICE leader to court, and that he didn’t view it as opposition to the administration’s actions in the city.

“But I think any judge needs to make clear to the parties who appear before him that they’ve got to respect his office, even if they disagree with rulings that he’s made,” said Schaerr, partner at the boutique firm Schaerr Jaffe.

Schiltz is the latest federal judge to criticize Justice Department attorneys over the Trump administration’s handling of major immigration cases, including the mistaken deportation of Maryland man Kilmar Abrego Garcia to a notorious prison in El Salvador. Top officials and congressional Republicans have, in turn, lashed out at judges hearing those legal challenges as left-wing activists.

Still, his latest order threatening contempt proceedings against an administration official is “incredibly unusual,” said Rachel Moran, a law professor at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.

“When you have a Bush appointee with conservative credentials who is not prone to issuing orders like this, it does make you pay more attention, or at least make the world pay more attention,” Moran said.

Schiltz declined to comment for this story.

‘Direct Heir’

Schiltz has solid conservative credentials, including helping prepare Scalia for his 1986 Senate confirmation hearings.

In a 2016 remembrance of the late justice, Schiltz said many of the recent tributes to Scalia are missing “an appreciation of what a good judge he was.”

“He exemplified many of the virtues to which all of us federal judges aspire, including fairness, dedication, honesty, and perspective,” he said.

Aaron Van Oort, a partner at Faegre Drinker Biddle and Reath’s Minneapolis office, said Schiltz is “a direct heir to Scalia in terms of a textualist, originalist approach” to his rulings.

“If you show up in his court, you better be ready to talk law up, down and sideways, because he will be rigorous on that,” Van Oort said. “That’s what you’re seeing with the orders where people, for whatever reason, are not following procedure or not following the requirements of law. He will call that out every time, no matter which side you’re on.”

Schiltz faced few questions at his Senate hearing in 2006, ahead of his unanimous confirmation.

Schaerr said Schiltz was “very conservative in his overall outlook, but I wouldn’t call him an ideologue.”

Family and Faith

Schiltz was raised in a “devoutly Catholic family,” and he spent much of his academic career at Catholic institutions, according to a judicial profile written last year by his career clerk, Elizabeth Welter, in the Federal Lawyer magazine.

He graduated from the College of St. Scholastica, a private college in Minnesota associated with the Benedictine order, before earning his law degree at Harvard. He was also a professor at Notre Dame Law School and founding associate dean of the University of St. Thomas School of Law.

Schiltz wrote a popular law review article aimed at early career lawyers, advising them on how to avoid being “unhealthy and unhappy” like many attorneys are.

In the article, he recounts how he and his wife both left high-paying Big Law jobs for the sake of spending more time with their family. “The life we were leading was not the life we had envisioned. We had strayed from the values with which we were raised,” he wrote.

Van Oort said Schiltz’s care for his family was apparent at the Eighth Circuit’s judicial conference this past summer, which his family, including an adult son with mental disabilities, also attended.

“You see the same person who is both the chief judge interacting with all of his colleagues, and a husband and a father,” Van Oort said.

When Justice Amy Coney Barrett, Schiltz’s former Notre Dame law student, had a child with Down syndrome, Schiltz and his wife visited her to share their own positive experiences raising a child with the condition, according to a Notre Dame magazine article.