BS BULLETIN:

• Minnesota federal judges handling separate challenges to President Trump’s immigration crackdown were communicating with each other behind the scenes about the cases.
• Judges held meetings, participated in running email threads, used a clerk-created spreadsheet identifying colleagues who could answer particular legal questions and developed templates for recurring court orders.
• Trump administration officials are questioning whether the cooperation crossed a line; the judges say every case was ultimately decided independently.

Here’s the controversy in plain English:

Federal judges deciding separate cases challenging President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown weren’t simply sitting in their individual courtrooms figuring everything out on their own.

They were talking to each other.

A lot.

According to disclosures about Minnesota’s federal court, judges dealing with a massive influx of immigration cases held meetings, communicated through running email threads and shared tools designed to help them deal with legal questions that repeatedly appeared in different cases.

Court clerks even created an informal spreadsheet showing which judges colleagues could consult about particular legal issues. Some judges also developed template orders that could be used when similar detention disputes landed before the court.

In a stunning political move, the chief judge of the Minneapolis federal bench disclosed the behind the scenes collaboration between all judges to thwart legal proceedings related to immigration cases this year.

Patrick Schiltz, who admitted his longtime involvement in a… https://t.co/DbkrOP9nGY

— Julie Kelly 🇺🇸 (@julie_kelly2) September 17, 2026

And that’s raising eyebrows inside the Trump administration.

The central question is whether this was simply overwhelmed judges sharing legal expertise — something judges are permitted to do — or whether coordination involving separate cases became extensive enough to compromise the independent decision-making expected from each judge.

George Mason University law professor Robert Luther III told Fox News the running email chain involving numerous cases struck him as “very weird and frankly unprecedented.” He drew an important distinction between administrative templates, which are common, and templates addressing substantive legal questions.

“Templates for substantive matters — that seems like something altogether different,” Luther told Fox.

The Trump administration is going considerably further.

Department of Homeland Security General Counsel James Percival accused former Minnesota Chief Judge Patrick Schiltz of “essentially conspiring with his judicial colleagues” to thwart the administration’s immigration enforcement.

The judges strongly dispute that characterization. Chief Judge Eric Tostrud told Fox that although judges communicated with each other, each judge independently decided every individual petition.

“The bottom line is that each of us made an independent decision with respect to the merits of each and every petition we were assigned,” Tostrud said.

And the Minnesota court was facing an extraordinary workload. The district received just 12 immigrant-detainee habeas petitions during all of 2024.

Through August of this year? 1,427.

Many raised similar or identical legal questions, according to Tostrud, making consultation between judges a way to process cases more quickly. He also noted that the judges did not always reach the same conclusions.

But there’s another problem fueling the controversy. Nobody outside the court knows exactly what was being shared. Tostrud declined to release the judges’ internal working materials, saying communications and documents created by judges and court employees aren’t public.

The Justice Department is separately criticizing seven Minnesota judges for giving on-the-record interviews about their experiences handling the immigration crackdown. DOJ says judges who publicly discussed pending or related matters should consider whether they need to recuse themselves from future cases.

Judges sitting down for 90-minute on-the-record interviews with the New York Times to criticize federal immigration enforcement seems imprudent. Especially when the matters being discussed are still pending and before the court. 6/7 active District of Minnesota judges 👀 pic.twitter.com/KmTFBrMrzM

— Eric W. (@EWess92) September 17, 2026

The judges maintain that they are permitted to discuss judicial independence and the administration of the court without commenting on the merits of pending cases.

So the dispute isn’t that judges merely spoke to each other. Judges do that. The question now being raised is how far the coordination went — and whether judges assigned supposedly independent immigration cases were sharing substantive legal strategies and materials behind the scenes.

DBS WIRE SOURCES:

• Fox News — Judges reveal behind-the-scenes coordination on Trump immigration cases
• Fox News — DHS chief discusses clashes with federal judges