From MPR News,
Feds seek to boot Minnesota judges from immigration cases after public comments.
MPR Reports
The Justice Department is seeking to disqualify two Minnesota federal judges from a pair of immigration-related cases. The move comes on the heels of ethics complaints the DOJ filed against Judges Patrick Schiltz, John Tunheim and five of their colleagues after they spoke to the New York Times for a Sept. 17 story about the Trump Administration’s wintertime immigration operation and its effect on the federal courts.
Both judges are on “senior” status, a form of semi-retirement. In that interview with the Times, the judges made clear that they consider any case filed against an individual, where their immigration status is among the legal issues being contested, to be illegitimate from the start. The Department cannot expect to get a fair hearing where these judges preside.
The first case involves Judge Schiltz. The DOJ is seeking to denaturalize Salah Osman Ahmed, a Somali-American convicted on a terrorism-related felony charge filed back in 2009. Ahmed was sentenced to serve three years in federal prison. The denaturalization civil case (File No. 26-cv-2536) was filed back in May. A hearing on the recusal request has been scheduled for November 23.
The second case involves alleged illegal voting by a South African noncitizen. File No. 26-cr-175 was filed last month and assigned to Judge Tunheim. A grand jury indicted the defendant, Hester Sophia Weihmann, on two felony counts related to illegal voting. MPR quotes Judge Tunheim,
Tunheim told the newspaper immigration agents were not “arresting, in my view, people who were dangerous criminals on the street.”
Weihmann’s case was one of about a dozen investigated by the Dept. of Homeland Security’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI, a/k/a “immigration agents”) division and charged in Minnesota. No one would classify illegal voting as “street” crime. Will Judge Tunheim dismiss these felony charges on that basis?
A hearing on Tunheim’s recusal has yet to be scheduled.