DOJ Prepares to Investigate Nearly Every Federal Judge in Blue State

Attorney General Todd Blanche is launching an investigation against almost every federal judge in Minnesota.

In a press conference Wednesday, Blanche announced that the Department of Justice filed a misconduct complaint in federal court against all but one of the federal district judges in Minnesota, attacking them for speaking to The New York Times for an article published earlier this month about the federal government’s immigration crackdown in the North Star State.

“Seven federal judges in the District of Minnesota talked to The New York Times about cases, some of which are ongoing, in a manner that the Department of Justice views as a clear violation of their ethical duties,” Blanche said. “Their conduct has undermined public confidence in an impartial judiciary in Minnesota.”

According to the complaint, U.S. District Judges Patrick Schlitz had a 90-minute interview with the publication, and six other federal judges in Minnesota also spoke to the Times. Schlitz, appointed by President George W. Bush, said to the newspaper that the Trump’s administration’s disregard for court orders during its immigration crackdown in the state “created a grave threat to the rule of law.”

“I would say aloud to myself, ‘This just never happens,’” Schlitz said while declining to discuss active cases.

“They weren’t arresting, in my view, people who were dangerous criminals on the street,” Tunheim said to the Times.

Blanche attacked the judges’ comments in the article as “blatantly false,” saying that the DOJ has asked the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals to investigate the judges, who should “recuse themselves from every case involving DHS, either criminal or civil in nature, because of the obvious bias they have shown in this article with The New York Times.”

That would essentially grind federal court proceedings in Minnesota to a halt, which is probably by design. Trump and Blanche have railed against federal judges who rule against the Trump administration, calling them activists. While it is rare for federal judges to speak to the press, it is not illegal, and none of the judges targeted by the DOJ Wednesday mentioned ongoing cases. Schlitz even told the Times that he believes the administration’s violations of his court orders were mostly inadvertent.

“My impression was that most, if not all, of the noncompliance was due to incompetence,” Schlitz said, “not due to conscious defiance of orders.” But even that deference wasn’t enough for Trump and Blanche.

Donald Trump is planning to hit the campaign trail for 32 days before the midterm elections.

That would put the president on the campaign trail for more than 94 percent of the time between now and November 3, effectively placing Trump at the center of an election cycle in which Republican candidates have increasingly tried to peel away from his influence.

The break-neck pace of the schedule has also spurred health concerns for a president who was recently caught out-of-breath after descending a set of stairs and climbing into his limo.

A spate of election-bound, pro-MAGA personalities have already broken from Trump and his agenda in an attempt to curry favor with their local electorates. The growing list includes Florida Representatives Maria Elvira Salazar and Byron Donalds (the latter of whom is running for the Sunshine State’s governor), Maine Republican gubernatorial candidate Bobby Charles, and Texas Republican congressional candidate Carlos De La Cruz.

Some hopeful office-seekers have even stripped their websites and campaign materials of Trump’s name, taking advice that the White House offered in July when staffers explicitly encouraged midterm-bound Republicans to split from Trump and his sinking reputation.

Top issues weighing down Trump’s popularity include the seemingly endless Iran war, the rising cost of living, an economy and supply chain thrown out of whack by the president’s reckless tariffs, the cost of health care, and the encroachment of AI and the industry’s data centers into American communities—a hot topic that Trump has unequivocally backed.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll published late last month suggested that the president’s influence is waning: Just 13 percent of Americans strongly approve of the president—compared to a 2025 YouGov poll that found 23 percent of people felt the same way this time last year.

Republican attitudes towards Trump have also changed, according to the Reuters/Ipsos poll. Just 35 percent of surveyed conservatives said they “strongly approved” of Trump’s job during his second term. In the same poll, 41 percent of registered voters said that they would vote for a Democratic candidate if the presidential election were conducted today.

But Trump refused to acknowledge the party’s divergence. Speaking with reporters at the White House on Tuesday, Trump insisted that “they all want me to go.”

“I’m one person,” Trump said. “They all want me to ​go campaign.”

The Trump administration is trying to deport a Hasidic Jew for protesting against Israel. 

The New York Times reports that Yehonatan Ovadia, a religious teacher in Rockland County, New York, had his visa revoked by the federal government for participating in an October 2023 protest against Israel’s actions in Gaza where an Israeli flag disappeared from a local town hall. 

Ovadia belongs to Satmar, an anti-Zionist religious sect that believes a Jewish state cannot be established before the arrival of the messiah. Shortly after the protest, he and another member of the sect were charged with hate crimes before pleading guilty to a lesser charge of disorderly conduct and paying a fine in early 2024. 

In August, the federal government revoked his religious worker visa and Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained him at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. Ovaida, an Israeli citizen who has been in the U.S. since 2022, said he took part in the protest but didn’t tear down the flag. His lawyers sued the government later that month, arguing that the government was punishing him for religious and political expression and conflating that with antisemitism.

“He’s against the Israeli government and the existence of the state of Israel for religious reasons, but to claim that he’s an antisemite is the peak of absurdity,” said Eric Lee, one of his attorneys.

“We demonstrated for Gaza, for the liberation of Gaza, for the rights of the Palestinians and to show to the world that the Jews, real Judaism, want to have peace,” Ovadia told the Times in a telephone interview.

“It is a privilege to be granted a visa or green card to live in the United States of America,” the  Department of Homeland Security said in a statement. “The Trump administration acted well within its statutory and constitutional authority, as it does with any alien who advocates for violence, glorifies and supports terrorists, harasses Jews and steals property.”

The White House has targeted noncitizen pro-Palestinian activists for deportation, including students and permanent residents, ever since President Trump signed an executive order directing the Department of Homeland Security to go after them for antisemitic activities. When Ovaida applied for an extension to his religious worker visa in 2025, the government demanded court documents and police records, and then stripped him of his legal status. 

Ovaida’s lawyers plan to request his release at a bond hearing Wednesday. If the government gets its way, Ovaida could end up being deported to the country he was protesting against.

Thanks to a 1980s anti–drug trafficking program, cities across the U.S. are being forced to turn over their license plate reader data to the Trump administration.

404 Media reports that the federal government is using the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area program to collect data from Flock, Axon, and other cameras used by local police, so that it can be used for a national surveillance program. The plan is to centralize the data on the government’s servers and make it available to other law enforcement agencies. Data collected by HIDTA can also be shared with the National License Plate Reader Program run by the Drug Enforcement Agency.

The program allows the federal government to get around local and state restrictions against Flock and similar license plate reader companies without oversight. 404 Media learned about the plans through public records and court documents.

The HIDTA program is part of the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy, which was just recognized by the Trump administration for “managing an automated license plate reader platform that brings together all levels of law enforcement.”

In many states, local police departments can’t even set up license plate cameras without agreeing to send their data to the federal government, 404 Media reports. In Georgia, for example, cities have to sign a memorandum of understanding promising to send their data to the HIDTA program.

Flock cameras are experiencing a backlash from the American public over their warrant-free surveillance and collection of data. They’ve been abused by local police to spy on people unrelated to law enforcement investigations, and have inspired protests at municipal meetings. And they collect far more than license plates: One hacked camera revealed the camera catalogs people, bicycles, small details such as bumper stickers, and, in one case, an American flag patch on a motorcyclist’s bag.

This latest news shows that the Trump administration could be doing anything it wants with the vast amount of data that these cameras collect, skirting the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. A centralized database such as the HIDTA could be misused by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the FBI, or any number of unscrupulous Trump administration officials.

Another Republican senator is begging the Trump administration to reduce its immigration raids.

West Virginia Senator and Trump loyalist Jim Justice—mostly known for parading his massive bulldog around Capitol Hill—drew a line in the sand in a Tuesday interview with Politico. Notably, Justice is not running for reelection and does not currently have to win voters over to his side.

“Before you know it, you get people that get carried away in their job and whatever it may be, and all of a sudden, then you’re dragging people away that have lived on your street corner for 15 years, and I don’t know that we need to be doing that stuff,” he said.

“To get better, the first thing you got to do is admit you’re doing something wrong.… And in this situation, with all that’s going on and all the stuff, we probably got to step back from it and say, ‘Maybe we’re doing something wrong here or there,’ and then adjust to that.”

“This is a stunning shift from Senator Jim Justice,” former Obama and Biden immigration policy adviser Andrea R. Flores wrote on X. “The alternative to ICE sweeps is legalization. People who have lived in your neighborhood for 15 years won’t have a path to legal status until both parties come together to create one.”

Kansas Republican Senator Roger Marshall (who is up for reelection) also made headlines for a similar rebuke of the Trump administration just last week.

“When ICE operates in Kansas, it needs to coordinate with our local law enforcement. Our sheriffs and police know these communities better than anyone, and working together keeps officers and residents safe,” Marshall wrote on X after a spike of ICE activity in multiple Kansas towns. “I’m closely following what’s happening in SW Kansas and have been in direct contact with Secretary Mullin and local law enforcement as ICE executes warrants in order to keep Kansans safe.” Marshall is up for reelection this November.

ICE conducted a massive immigration raid in West Virginia earlier this year named “Operation Country Roads.” They arrested and detained more than 600 people in two weeks, the vast majority of whom were eventually revealed to have no criminal record—a far cry from the dangerous people ICE constantly claims to be prioritizing.