The Justice Department Lost in Court. So It Went After the Judges.

On December 19, 2025, the chief judge of the Sixth Circuit dismissed the Justice Department's misconduct complaint — a formal accusation, filed with the judiciary's own disciplinary body, that a judge has broken ethics rules — against James Boasberg, the Washington judge who had halted the administration's use of a wartime law to deport Venezuelans. The complaint accused Boasberg of something stranger than bias.

By singling out a sitting President who was (and remains) a party to dozens of active cases, Judge Boasberg attempted to transform a routine housekeeping agenda into a forum to persuade ... federal judges of his preconceived belief that the Trump Administration would violate court orders. — United States Department of Justice

That was the offense: not a wrong ruling, but a private word to other judges, warning that the administration would defy their orders. Jeffrey Sutton — a George W. Bush appointee to whom Chief Justice Roberts had personally transferred the case to avoid any conflict — threw it out. ^[1]

A recycling of unadorned allegations with no reference to a source does not corroborate them. — Jeffrey S. Sutton

Sutton added that even if Boasberg had said what the department alleged, a judge privately worrying about executive compliance in a closed-door conference violates no ethics rule at all. ^[1] A dismissal like that is supposed to end a theory. It ended nothing. The target list had started inside the department's own building. By July 2025 more than fifty federal immigration judges had been fired by brief email with no reasons given, many of them flagged on conservative watch lists for past associations with Democrats. ^[2] In August the department sued the entire federal district court in Maryland — the institution itself — after its chief judge blocked immigration removals, and filed the first misconduct complaint against Boasberg. ^[3] On February 10, 2026, the attorney general's office wrote to all ninety-three United States attorneys, asking them to name judges worth removing.

The Department of Justice solicited the most egregious examples of this obstruction from our U.S. Attorney Offices to assist Congress with efforts to rein in judges violating their oaths in accordance with their constitutional oversight authority of the judicial branch. — United States Department of Justice

The memo said the material would assist Congress with impeachment referrals. ^[4] It went out the same day a Michigan judge threw out the department's demand for unredacted data on eight million voters. ^[5] In April, a divided D.C. Circuit panel ordered Boasberg to terminate his contempt probe into the deportations — contempt being the power to punish defiance of an order, the thing that makes any judicial order enforceable. ^[6] And on September 30, the department filed misconduct complaints against seven federal judges in Minnesota for talking to a newspaper, and asked that they be recused — removed — from every Department of Homeland Security case in the district. ^[7] Now look at what the complaints actually charge. The Boasberg complaint was about a private warning to the chief justice. The Minnesota complaints are about press interviews that the judiciary's own Committee on Codes of Conduct had explicitly permitted, in an advisory opinion allowing judges to speak publicly on subjects central to the judiciary, such as the rule of law and judicial independence. ^[7] Both times, the offense is speech, not decision. That is the tell. Rulings can be appealed, and the administration keeps winning those appeals: between May and July 2025 the district courts ruled against it nearly 94 percent of the time, and the Supreme Court reversed those outcomes nearly as often through terse emergency orders. ^[8] So the target slides from the decision to the decider — when you cannot reverse the ruling, you work on the person who might make the next one. Nor did the Minnesota filing come out of nowhere. The runway was eight months long. In January, Judge Patrick Schiltz counted ninety-six ICE violations of court orders in a single month and summoned the agency's acting director to explain why he should not be held in contempt. ^[9] On January 27, the president answered.

ICE has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence. — Patrick J. Schiltz

The complaints against that same bench arrived September 30. No document discloses the department's purpose. The pressure reading is simply the best fit to a record in which every formal challenge has failed and each failure has been followed by a wider one. The ledger is worth sitting with, because it is what the campaign has already collected without winning a single formal test. On voter data, the department sued roughly two dozen states; at least eleven handed over the records rather than fight, while judges in California, Oregon, and Georgia refused — and in Georgia the FBI reportedly seized Fulton County's data anyway after a procedural dismissal. ^[5][10] In Wisconsin, a state judge who helped an immigrant slip past waiting ICE agents is now a convicted felon; she resigned in January, calling the case a threat to judicial independence. ^[11] Twelve federal judges appointed by presidents of both parties have said the Supreme Court's terse reversals leave them exposed and lend weight to the claim that the lower bench is biased. ^[12] And in the contempt appeal argued this week, the department's position is that judges lack the authority to investigate crimes at all — that the executive cannot be held in criminal contempt by the very judge whose order it defied. ^[13] There is a human texture under all of it. In February, a government attorney stood before a Minnesota judge in open court.

The system sucks. This job sucks. — Julie Le Brun

She was asking, in effect, to be held in contempt so she could get some sleep. ^[14] She was removed from the case. Seven months later the department filed against that bench. The most honest expression of the whole campaign is what the department asked for in Minnesota. Nobody moved to strip these seven judges of their robes. The demand was recusal: that the entire local bench lose every Department of Homeland Security case in the very district where a judge had counted ninety-six violated orders in a single month. ^[7][9] You don't have to defeat a judge to neutralize him. You just have to make sure he's no longer the one holding the gavel.