The Justice Department’s Attacks on the Rule of Law in Minnesota

When a federal judge orders the government to release people detained in violation of the Constitution, the government has two legal options: comply with the court’s order or appeal.

Those are the choices, whether the government failed to provide a reason for a person’s arrest other than his ethnicity, or failed to establish that an undocumented person being detained was a flight risk, or detained someone without a warrant and it was shown that the circumstances required a warrant.

Two options: comply or appeal.

But in Minnesota, the Department of Justice manufactured a third option.

Without complying with — or appealing — the court’s orders, it moved people it had illegally detained to a detention center in Texas and then deported them to Mexico and Ecuador. These actions occurred in conjunction with the shocking display of government violence.

That violence included mass arrests of people in Minnesota culminating in the killing by government agents of two American citizens who were peacefully protesting those actions.

Dubbed Operation Metro Surge, those actions took place from December 2025 to March 2026.

That conduct was not just bitterly criticized by private citizens and watchdog groups. It was faulted by judges as well.

Now, the Justice Department, under Attorney General Todd Blanche, has filed ethics complaints against federal judges in Minnesota who spoke with The New York Times in September 2026 about their frustration with the Department of Homeland Security’s actions.

In their comments, the judges said that the behavior of DHS in Minnesota constituted a threat to the rule of law.  The DOJ’s ethics complaints try to frame the judges’ comments as a threat to judicial impartiality motivated by their seeking personal publicity. In reality, the judges were so concerned about the lawlessness of the operation that felt compelled to point that out.

At Georgia Lawyers for the Rule of Law, we agree with the judges. The real threat to the rule of law lies in the government misconduct the judges described, as well as in the Department’s illegal detentions and distortion of habeas corpus rights. The ethics complaint itself is based on a blatant distortion of the factual basis for Operation Metro Surge and the court cases its policies engendered.

Consider the record. Operation Metro Surge swept more than 3,500 people into detention and deported 1,700 over the course of three months.  The Minnesota federal courts were swamped by these detentions and the resulting filings for relief, including more than 1,000 habeas petitions.

Judges consistently found fault with the government actions.

Minnesota’s federal judges issued close to 100 rulings finding that DHS violated detainees’ Constitutional rights, including in many cases not providing any “reason” for their detentions other than their ethnicity. In many cases, the government deprived detainees of their rights to a bond hearing and, in many cases involving U.S. citizens, violated their habeas corpus rights.  In many respects, the decisions to detain folks were based largely on ethnicity and nothing else.

That is what troubled the Minnesota federal judges.

The judges’ frustration was about a pattern of misconduct by the government, including repeated defiance of court orders by relocating and deporting people whose constitutional rights the courts were trying to protect, and ginning up arrest warrants on false pretenses.

The judges expressed frustration with the logic of the government: a detention deemed by a federal judge to be unlawful in Minneapolis does not become lawful if the person detained is spirited away to a Texas facility or even to another country.

If constitutional protections can be evaded by ignoring court orders and moving detained people to another state or country, the Great Writ of habeas corpus, which gives people the right to contest their detention before a judge, will be rendered meaningless.

The unfairness of the government’s argument is plain when applied to the citizens caught in the sweep.

No one would accept that a U.S. citizen in Minnesota who was wrongly seized in her own city loses the right to seek relief in her home courts because the government shipped her hundreds of miles away under cover of night. Applying the same policy to undocumented immigrants does not legitimize it.

In fact, it makes it more dangerous, because it targets people with the fewest resources to seek the protection of our courts against their possibly unlawful detention.

Judges should speak with restraint about matters before them, and reasonable people can debate where those lines fall. But an ethics complaint that misstates the factual basis of the judges’ concerns is not a good-faith defense of judicial norms. It is an effort to intimidate the judiciary into silence about executive malfeasance and noncompliance with court orders.

The rule of law depends on courts that have the authority to say “stop” and a government that stops when ordered to. When the Department of Justice defies court orders and then attacks the judges who issued them because they expressed concern about the situation, the integrity of our justice system is at risk.

In Minnesota, the victims of government noncompliance with court orders were primarily undocumented people. If the government can ignore court orders and attack the judges who complain about such misconduct, tomorrow the victim could be you.