Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward has moved to disqualify two Minnesota federal judges from separate immigration-related matters, arguing that public comments they gave to the New York Times created an appearance of bias against the Trump administration’s enforcement agenda.
CBS News reported that Woodward, the Justice Department’s third-highest-ranking official, filed the requests Tuesday seeking the recusals of U.S. District Judges Patrick Schiltz and John Tunheim. Woodward is the only government lawyer who signed the motions, and the department promoted them on social media.
The filings put judicial impartiality, citizenship integrity, and election enforcement on a collision course. One case involves a bid to strip a Minnesota man of U.S. citizenship. The other charges a South African national with illegally voting in the 2024 election. Schiltz has set a hearing on the motion against him for Nov. 23.
Woodward tied the recusal push to remarks Schiltz and Tunheim made in a New York Times article published last month. In that piece, each judge raised concerns about the administration’s handling of cases tied to Operation Metro Surge, the immigration crackdown in Minnesota earlier this year.
In the motion aimed at Schiltz, Woodward framed the stakes around denaturalization work he described as historic in scale.
"A judge who has publicly taken sides on the political issue of immigration enforcement cannot then preside over a case concerning one of the Justice Department's key immigration initiatives: pursuing the largest denaturalization effort in Department history to restore trust and integrity in U.S. citizenship,"
He pressed the point on public confidence as well.
"Absent recusal, the American people will reasonably question whether Judge Schiltz can be impartial regarding this important matter defending the integrity of American citizenship."
On Tunheim, Woodward used sharper language. He wrote that, to Tunheim, the “rule of law” “apparently means ignoring the law when it comes to illegal aliens who have broken the law.” Woodward said the judges’ statements and participation in the Times article “give rise to the appearance of bias in immigration-related cases,” which he argued warrants their removal from the matters.
Schiltz is overseeing a case in which the Trump administration seeks to strip a Minnesota man of his U.S. citizenship. That posture matches the department’s stated push for a major denaturalization drive, a tool prosecutors use when they contend citizenship was unlawfully obtained or maintained.
Tunheim is assigned a criminal matter against a South African national who faces two charges of illegally voting in the 2024 election. The defendant has pleaded not guilty. Illegal voting cases sit at the center of election-integrity enforcement, and the recusal fight now hangs over that prosecution’s path.
Authorities have not publicly released fuller docket identifiers for either Minnesota matter in the material summarized here, and the individuals’ names were not provided in that reporting. Investigators and the courts will still have to resolve the recusal questions before the merits fully advance under the current assignments.
The Minnesota filings follow a parallel move against U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes, who sits on the trial court in Washington, D.C. Woodward moved over the weekend to disqualify Reyes from a case involving President Trump’s efforts to overhaul a historic public golf course in the nation’s capital.
Reyes rejected that effort Sunday. She accused the Justice Department of weaponizing “selective quotations to bring a baseless recusal motion.”
The pattern extends beyond these three judges. Last month, after the Times article, the Justice Department filed a judicial misconduct complaint against all but one of the federal judges in Minnesota. It has also submitted ethics complaints against Reyes and U.S. District Judge James Boasberg. The Boasberg complaint was dismissed.
Separately, the department sued all 15 federal judges in Maryland over a standing order that temporarily blocks the immediate removal of immigrants challenging their deportations. A Virginia judge dismissed that lawsuit, and the department appealed. Taken together, the actions show a sustained departmental fight over how immigration and related cases are handled in multiple districts.
Federal ethics rules bar judges from publicly discussing cases pending before them. A February advisory opinion from the Judicial Conference, the policy-making body for the federal courts, also sketched space for broader speech.
Those principles “permit judges to speak or talk about the independence of the judiciary, or advocate for the rule of law in general, including why both values are crucial to our system of government.” The Judicial Conference Committee on Codes of Conduct added that there is “room, in at least some circumstances, for the measured defense of judicial colleagues from illegitimate forms of criticism and attacks that risk undermining judicial independence or the rule of law, whether or not they rise to the level of persecution.”
That guidance does not settle whether Schiltz and Tunheim crossed from general rule-of-law commentary into case-specific or enforcement-specific commentary that would require recusal. The motions argue they did. The judges’ full verbatim remarks to the Times were not reproduced in the seed reporting, so the hearing record will matter.
Law professors who focus on judicial ethics offered a sharply different reading of the department’s strategy. Charles Geyh of Indiana University Bloomington said the filings look like a deliberate confrontation.
"They're looking to essentially antagonize the judges and to square off against them in some manner,"
Geyh called the effort “just a perpetuation of the project” and said it forms “part of the network of efforts to delegitimize the judges involved, make them look partisan, make them look biased as a way to quiet them and diminish the check from the judiciary.” He also argued that general concerns about the rule of law, raised in response to departmental conduct, can be “the opposite of bias” and can reflect judges “really doing what they need to do to protect the rule of law.”
Stephen Gillers of New York University, who has written on judicial ethics, described a public-facing strategy. He said it is “obvious DOJ has decided that its game plan is to challenge the fairness of the judges as a way of undermining judicial authority in the eyes of the public.” He labeled the filings “performative” and said the department “wants to publicize them to discourage public confidence in what the courts are doing when they rule against the administration.”
Those are advocacy assessments from academics, not court findings. Woodward’s papers cast the same facts as a straightforward impartiality problem in active immigration, citizenship, and voting cases. The department’s public promotion of the motions underscores how high it ranks that appearance-of-bias claim.
Recusal practice asks whether a reasonable observer would question a judge’s impartiality. Woodward’s motions answer yes, based on the Times comments about immigration enforcement after Operation Metro Surge. Reyes has already said no in her D.C. matter and rejected the bid as baseless.
Schiltz’s Nov. 23 hearing gives a concrete checkpoint. Tunheim’s response posture was not detailed in the same reporting. No public results have been released yet on how either Minnesota judge will rule, and authorities have not said in that coverage whether reassignment is already under internal discussion if recusal is granted.
If the motions succeed, new judges would take the denaturalization case and the illegal-voting prosecution. If they fail, Schiltz and Tunheim remain on the bench for matters the department calls central to citizenship integrity and election enforcement. Either outcome will shape how aggressively the department continues to police perceived bias in immigration-linked dockets.
The broader inventory is already long: Minnesota misconduct complaints, ethics filings against Reyes and Boasberg, the Maryland judges lawsuit now on appeal, and the rejected Reyes disqualification effort. Woodward’s latest papers keep the focus on two live cases where the government wants maximum confidence that the court has not “publicly taken sides” on enforcement policy.
Courts that police citizenship and ballots cannot leave impartiality as a slogan. When enforcement cases meet public commentary, the recusal fight is the accountability test, and the public is watching who applies it straight.
