Category: Breitbart
Activist judge who downplayed Don Lemon’s church antics, summoned ICE director donated to pro-illegal-alien group
The Minnesota-based federal judge who declined to issue arrest warrants for Don Lemon and several of the radicals accused of storming into Cities Church on Jan. 18 demanded on Tuesday that acting ICE Director Todd Lyons “appear personally before the Court and show cause why he should not be held in contempt of Court.”
Despite U.S. District Court Judge Patrick Schiltz’s portrayal in the liberal media as a conservative-minded and “mild-mannered George W. Bush appointee,” it appears that Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin’s characterization of Schiltz as “just another activist judge” is more apt.
‘Another activist judge who is clearly more concerned about politics than the safety of the Minnesotans.’
Bill Melugin of Fox News revealed this week that Schiltz is linked to the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota, a liberal activist outfit that provides free legal representation to illegal aliens, low-income migrants, and so-called refugees in Minnesota and North Dakota.
The ILCM routinely criticizes the men and women of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, accusing them of occupation, racism, “Islamophobi[a],” and engaging in “execution-style murders.”
After Schiltz’s name was found among the donors and volunteers listed in the ILCM’s 2019 annual report, the judge — dubbed the “latest hero to the anti-Trump resistance” by Politico — admitted to Fox News Digital that he has “donated for many years to the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota.”
“I have also donated for many years to Mid-Minnesota Legal Aid. I believe that poor people should be able to get legal representation,” added Schiltz, who has served as a delegate at Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party conventions.
The donor to the illegal alien support group noted in a Monday court filing that his “patience is at an end” and ordered Lyons to explain on Friday why he should not be held in contempt for supposedly violating an earlier order.
Todd Lyons, acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Photographer: Kent Nishimura/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Schiltz indicated that Juan Hugo Tobay Robles, an Ecuadorian national who illegally entered the U.S. in 1999 and was detained by immigration agents on Jan. 6, should have been provided with a bond hearing or released earlier this month.
The Bush judge indicated in his Tuesday order that if Robles was released before the hearing, Lyons would not be required to appear. A lawyer for the Ecuadorian told the Associated Press that his client was released Tuesday afternoon.
“Judge Patrick J. Schiltz is just another activist judge who is clearly more concerned about politics than the safety of the Minnesotans,” stated DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin. “Does this judge really think Director Lyons should take time out of his day leading ICE to target the worst of the worst criminal illegals including murderers, rapists, pedophiles, and terrorists into our country to testify at a hearing for one illegal alien’s removal proceedings?”
While Schiltz evidently figured that swift and decisive action was required in the case of Robles, he took an entirely different approach in the case of the radicals who assembled on Jan. 18 for a so-called “ICE Out Action,” then stormed a Christian church in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
After the church invasion, the Trump Justice Department promptly filed a criminal complaint in the District of Minnesota charging eight of the suspected invaders with violations of the Freedom of Access to Clinics Entrances Act.
The DOJ’s pursuit of accountability was frustrated at the outset when Magistrate Judge Douglas Micko — whose wife reportedly works for Minnesota’s anti-ICE attorney general, Keith Ellison — declined to support all but three of the requested arrest affidavits.
After Micko threw up additional roadblocks, the DOJ turned to Schiltz for a review of the magistrate’s no-probable-cause finding in hopes that he might issue the warrants.
In an angry and sarcastic Jan. 23 letter to the Eighth Circuit’s chief judge, Steven Colloton, Schiltz downplayed the church invasion, glossed over the invaders’ intimidation tactics, cast doubt on whether arresting them would deter copycats, emphasized that “there is no emergency,” and noted that if the petition filed by the government seeks an immediate decision, “the petition is frivolous.”
In a separate letter, he suggested there was “no evidence that [Don Lemon and his producer] engaged in any criminal behavior or conspired to do so.”
Sure enough, Schiltz indicated that he would not issue arrest warrants until conferring with his colleagues — a meeting that was supposed to happen last week but was delayed.
Over the weekend, a three-judge Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals panel denied the government’s petition to review the magistrate’s refusal to sign the warrants.
While U.S. Circuit Court Judge Steven Grasz, an appointee of President Donald Trump, recognized that the complaint and affidavit “clearly establish probably cause for all five arrest warrants” and that “there is no discretion to refuse to issue an arrest warrant once probable cause for its issuance has been shown,” the government had “failed to establish that it has no other adequate means of obtaining the requested relief.”
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How the military is computing the killing chain
In 2025, the nomenclature caught up with the reality. For decades, the United States had operated under the fiction of a Department of Defense, a name that suggested protection, reaction, and a reluctance to engage. When Secretary Pete Hegseth signed the memoranda that would redefine the American military for the algorithmic age, the letterhead had changed. It was the Department of War again.
The revival of the old title was not merely cosmetic. It was an unapologetic signal, a shift from a defensive posture to a mission-focused one. Then between late 2025 and early 2026, Hegseth released a flurry of new memos announcing that the United States intended to become an “AI-first” war-fighting force. The language was clipped, urgent, and devoid of the hand-wringing that usually accompanies the introduction of new lethal means. The department now treats AI not as a support tool but as a core element of warfare, intelligence, and organizational power.
There is a simulation engine that alludes without irony to Orson Scott Card’s novel about child soldiers fighting insectoid aliens.
Reading through these documents, one is struck by the anxiety of the “algorithm gap,” which echoes the “missile gap” of the Cold War, with the stakes shifted from megatonnage to processing speed. The prevailing sentiment is that falling behind an adversary’s AI capabilities would be as catastrophic as falling behind in nuclear weapons. The Department of War does not intend to be a laggard. “Speed and adaptation win,” one memo states.
To achieve this speed, the Department has declared war on its own bureaucracy. The memos speak of a “wartime approach” to innovation, dismantling the risk-averse culture that has defined Pentagon procurement for half a century. The endless committees and boards have been dissolved, replaced with a “CTO Action Group” empowered to make quick calls. The ethos is that of Silicon Valley, grafting Mark Zuckerberg’s call to “move fast and break things” onto an institution whose business is to break things in a more literal sense.
The specific initiatives, what the Department calls “Pace-Setting Projects,” read like the chapter titles of a science-fiction novel. There is “Swarm Forge,” a project designed to pair elite war-fighters with technologists to experiment with drone swarms. There is “Ender’s Foundry,” a simulation engine meant to war-game against AI adversaries, a name that alludes without irony to Orson Scott Card’s novel about child soldiers fighting insectoid aliens. There is “Open Arsenal,” which promises to turn intelligence into weapons in hours rather than years.
Photo by ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS / AFP via Getty Images
What is being built here is “civil-military fusion,” a concept the Chinese have long championed and which the United States is now adopting with a convert’s zeal. The Department is actively courting the private sector, mentioning commercial AI models such as Google’s Gemini and xAI’s Grok. It is bringing in tech executives to run the show, with a new chief technology officer empowered to clear bureaucratic blockers.
The transformation is not limited to the battlefield but permeates the “enterprise,” a sterile word for the three million personnel who make up the Department’s nervous system. The vision is total: Under a program called GenAI.mil, every analyst, logistician, and staff officer will be issued a secure AI assistant to draft reports and code software. The goal is to embed AI systems across war-fighting, intelligence, and support functions until the distinction between soldier and data processor dissolves. The focus is on “decision superiority,” out-thinking the opponent at every turn.
The drive for decision superiority leads to a profound shift in the role of human judgment. The memos describe “Agent Network,” a project to develop AI agents for battle management “from campaign planning to kill chain execution.” They speak of “interpretable results,” a concession to the idea that humans should know why the machine decided to fire. The momentum is toward “human on the loop,” in which a human may abort an attack, rather than “human in the loop,” in which the human must initiate it. We are entering an era of “hyper-war,” in which AI systems could escalate a conflict in seconds, before a human commander can pour a cup of coffee.
The Department is betting that American ingenuity, harnessed in code, will secure the future, that it can maintain “America’s global AI dominance” through force of will and capital. The memos outline a future in which algorithms join soldiers on the battlefield, data platforms become as crucial as tanks, and decisions are increasingly informed by machines. It is a grand experiment in efficiency. We have decided that if warfare is now a battle of algorithms, we intend to algorithmically outgun the world. The name on the building has changed to reflect the reality: We are no longer defending. We are computing the kill.
Are illegal-alien rapists and murderers now considered the new Anne Franks?
Just when you think the left can’t sink any farther, you get this gem of a concept. And this, from “Rapid Response 47″ on X.
Governor Tim Walz (D) says, “Many of us grew up reading that story of Anne Frank. Somebody’s going to write that children’s story about Minnesota.”
Does the governor already know some brave lefties hiding these poor, poor innocent individuals from mean old ferocious ICE?
I addressed this issue last July here with this cartoon.
Isn’t it rather ironic that Gov. Walz would use a young Jewish girl during World War II to paint a picture of so-called Nazi tactics? Many of the Minneapolis rioters themselves seemed to have shifted their focus from violently campaigning in support of Hamas over Israel. Were they conveniently forgetting the events of October 7, 2023, when Hamas committed atrocities that would have made even the German Gestapo blush?
RELATED: The sanctuary city playbook is spreading in red states
Photo by Stephanie Tacy/NurPhoto via Getty Images
So does President Trump back off at this point and let Minneapolis and the state of Minnesota in general fall into a sinkhole of their own creation? Let “what happens in Minnesota stay in Minnesota,” and the governor, senators, and local police agencies have a jolly good time handling their own streets and neighborhoods?
Another of my cartoons from last December already addressed that issue.
One thing is for sure: The left is not backing down. So for the president and all fed-up patriots, are we ready to finally say, “Enough is enough!”
BIG BEAUTIFUL REFUNDS: Americans Will See an Average $1,000 Boost to Their Tax Refunds: Report
Refund season just got a lot bigger.
The Data Is In — and the Narrative Is Wrong
It would appear that most mainstream economists and legacy journalists either don’t believe the “numbers” or don’t like what they…
Peaceful Protest
“Peaceful Protest,” editorial cartoon by Tom Stiglich for The American Spectator on Jan. 27, 2026.
