Minnesota has vowed that ICE will face consequences for the crimes it has committed over the last few months. Most prominent were the horrifying street executions of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, but behind them is a dizzying array of brutal assaults on regular Americans and the wholesale shredding of constitutional rights.
Outgoing governor Tim Walz has urged Minnesotans to record ICE agents whenever they see them in action, to create a database of their crimes for “future prosecutions”. Now Chief Judge Patrick Schiltz, the top federal judge in Minnesota, has vowed that the state will protect the “rule of law” by holding ICE officials in criminal contempt of court.
NEW: Minnesota's top federal judge is threatening to hold Trump administration officials in criminal contempt if they continue defying court orders in immigration cases.
— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) February 27, 2026
"One way or another, ICE will comply." https://t.co/fMWUgzxRrq pic.twitter.com/DKPN3BdpyC
In a supplemental order of an immigration case Schiltz is presiding over, he laid out that the Minnesota courts have expressed “grave concerns about ICE’s noncompliance with court orders” and notes that:
“Unfortunately, the government’s response to the Court’s order was not to do a better job complying with court orders, but instead to attack the Court.”
Trump and his goons may not like it, but the rule of law still means something in Minnesota. Schiltz concludes:
“This Court will continue to do whatever is required to protect the rule of law, including, if necessary, moving to the use of criminal contempt. One way or another, ICE will comply with this Court’s orders.”
But how to enforce this?
That’s easy enough to say, but how would a Minnesota judge actually make ICE, a federal agency, bend to its will? In an ideal world, that would mean threatening senior ICE officials with criminal contempt, which may see a particularly angry judge sentence them to time behind bars. But, as you may have noticed, we don’t live in an ideal world, and those officials could probably ignore the judges without much consequence.
However, while they can get away with ignoring the court, individual officials seem to be concluding that it’s not worth putting their freedom on the line for individual cases. For example, in at least one case, the court ordered ICE’s acting director to appear personally to explain noncompliance. ICE didn’t show up, but the threat was enough to get them to release the individual they’d detained.
On a macro level, this kind of federal vs state conflict does not bode well for the future. The United States is founded on individual states cooperating (even if reluctantly) with the federal government. If that breaks down? Well, the “United” in “USA” starts to look a little outdated all of a sudden.
Published: Feb 27, 2026 11:08 am