Judge denies Minnesota’s request to end ICE surge in Minneapolis | Minneapolis
A federal judge has rejected the Minnesota state government’s request to end a federal immigration operation that left government agents killing two people in Minneapolis and sparking weeks of protests.
The state, along with the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, had filed a lawsuit seeking to end the Trump administration’s Operation Subway Surge in the city following the death of Renee Good, who was shot and killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent this month.
Alex Pretti, the second person to protest ICE’s presence, has since been shot and killed by federal agents. The shootings sparked a wave of fierce condemnation in Minneapolis and beyond.
But on Saturday, federal judge Kate Menendez rejected a request by states and cities to end the operation and send 3,000 ICE agents home.
The plaintiffs claimed that the Trump administration violated the 10th Amendment of the Constitution, which protects the autonomy of states against federal intervention beyond the powers specified in the Constitution, through the ICE operation.
But these claims “offer no metrics to determine when lawful law enforcement seizes turn into illegal seizures; they merely argue that the excesses of Operation Metro Surge were so extreme that the surge exceeded the limit at which it should exist,” wrote MenendezNominated for the bench during Joe Biden’s presidency in 2021.
“An announcement that Operation Metro Surge has gone this far ‘on the other side of the line’ is a thin reed on which to base injunction.”
Menendez acknowledged that the operation had a “profound and even heartbreaking” impact on Minneapolis, and that in addition to the shootings, “there is evidence that ICE and CBP (Customs and Border Protection) agents engaged in racial profiling, excessive use of force, and other harmful actions.”
But the judge said he wasn’t ruling on the tactics of the operation, only that states and cities had failed to show that the administration had violated the 10th amendment.
U.S. attorney general Pam Bondi sent He said the decision on X was a “BIG” win for the administration.
“Neither asylum policies nor meritless lawsuits will prevent the Trump Administration from enforcing federal law in Minnesota,” Bondi wrote.
Brian Carter, a Minnesota attorney, said “this situation is unprecedented in the 250-year history of our country” and that the agents were “essentially an army sent to Minneapolis to commit widespread unlawful violence.”
Trump said Ice would “de-escalate some tension” after the shootings and that he would send Tom Homan, the president’s border czar, to Minneapolis to oversee the operation. But the administration insisted that ICE agents were acting legally in support of federal immigration laws.
The decision comes as more than 300 demonstrations are expected to take place Saturday in all 50 states and Washington, D.C., in what organizers are calling “Ice Came Out Everywhere.”
Organizers, led by the national grassroots organization 50501, say today’s protests are in response to a series of recent deaths involving federal immigration agents, including the fatal shootings of Pretti and Good in Minneapolis earlier this month, the killing of Geraldo Campos at an immigrant detention facility in Texas and the shooting of Keith Porter Jr. by an off-duty ICE officer in Los Angeles.
