Law, Power, and Justice

www.nytimes.com/2026/01/31/us/judge-minnesota-ice-ruling.html

A federal judge in Minnesota denied a request by the state government and the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul on Saturday to temporarily block a surge of federal immigration agents that has led to three shootings, thousands of arrests and weeks of protests.

The judge, Kate M. Menendez, who was nominated to the bench by President Joseph R. Biden Jr., had resisted requests by state lawyers for an immediate ruling on halting the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement campaign, known as Operation Metro Surge, which began late last year.

The state and the cities argued in a lawsuit filed on Jan. 12 that the decision to send some 3,000 immigration agents to Democratic-led Minnesota over the objections of local officials amounted to a violation of state sovereignty under the 10th Amendment. They also described the deployment as an illegal attempt to coerce them into cooperating with civil immigration enforcement. The Trump administration dismissed that legal theory and defended their actions as a lawful campaign to crack down on illegal immigration