Federal judges in Minnesota worked together against President Trump's White House.

 Federal judges in Minnesota worked together behind the scenes during this year's immigration crackdown to stop ICE deportations and run a coordinated operation against President Trump's White House.

The judges shared templates, were glued to their phones, and moved in lockstep on detention cases to make sure nothing was missed, and no migrant could be deported.  

They then went on the record this week to accuse the Trump administration of threatening the rule of law.

According to a report, Former Chief U.S. District Judge Patrick Schiltz, and six other judges on the District of Minnesota bench, called what happened in courthouses “a grave threat to the rule of law.”

He said that if you take that rule of law away, you get anarchy or authoritarianism.

The judges admitted to;

• Meeting regularly and running group email threads to keep track of ICE and the migrants
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• Having clerks keep a spreadsheet of which judge to call on which legal question
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• Built templates so they could issue the same kinds of detention orders over and over
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• Stayed on their phones so a two-hour movie would not mean someone “woke up in New Mexico”
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• They told ICE to hold people, produce people, give bond hearings, or stop a transfer.
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• Schiltz then published lists claiming ICE had broken dozens of those orders in January and February and threatened contempt, including against ICE’s acting director. Critics say the judges stopped treating each case as its own and started running a coordinated operation against the executive branch to stop the deportation of illegal migrants. The judges said court staff worked 16-hour days, seven days a week during Operation Metro Surge, to make sure migrants were not deported.Judges said they were entering orders late at night and first thing in the morning.
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• In January, Schiltz issued a blistering public order listing 96 court directives he said ICE had violated in 74 cases since Jan. 1.
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• He wrote that ICE had likely broken more orders in that single month than some federal agencies break in their entire existence.
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• He later admitted that the noncompliance was due to understaffing and not a plan to defy the courts.