US judge denies Minnesota bid to suspend immigration sweeps

A US judge dealt a setback on Saturday to Minnesota’s attempt to force Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to suspend its wide-ranging detention and deportation operation in the state.

Federal authorities under President Donald Trump have carried out sweeping raids across Minnesota communities in search of undocumented migrants, detaining thousands and fatally shooting two US citizens in the process, triggering widespread outrage.

Ruling on Minnesota’s request for a temporary restraining order, federal judge Katherine Menendez wrote that “ultimately, the Court finds that the balance of harms does not decisively favour an injunction. ”

Minnesota argues that the month-long federal operation violated its sovereignty as a state.

In her ruling, Menendez stressed that she was not making a final judgement on the state’s broader case by declining to issue a temporary restraining order, a decision that would follow further arguments in court.

She also made no determination on whether the deeply divisive immigration crackdown had broken the law.

The decision came a day after tens of thousands of Minnesotans took to the streets in a mass protest against the operation, known as Metro Surge, which has also been opposed by the state’s Democratic leadership.

Disappointed

The mayor of Minneapolis, Minnesota’s largest city and the primary target of the federal raids, said the ruling was a blow.

“Of course, we’re disappointed,” Mayor Jacob Frey said in a statement.

“This decision doesn’t change what people here have lived through — fear, disruption and harm caused by a federal operation that never belonged in Minneapolis in the first place.”

The fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by masked, heavily armed agents sparked a nationwide outcry, after which Trump removed the combative Customs and Border Protection commander Gregory Bovino and replaced him with his border chief Tom Homan, who pledged to scale back the operation under certain conditions.

Ahead of Saturday’s ruling, David Schultz, a professor of politics and legal studies at Hamline University, said Minnesota was arguing that the federal government, through ICE enforcement and related actions, was “trying to force or coerce the state into doing certain things”.

He said Attorney General Pam Bondi had sent a letter to Minnesota after the killing of Alex Pretti, warning, “If you want the ICE operations to stop, we want you to do this, this and this.”

“It read almost like a threat,” Schultz added.

Bondi described the judge’s ruling as a “huge” legal victory for the Justice Department.

“Neither sanctuary policies nor meritless litigation will stop the Trump administration from enforcing federal law in Minnesota,” she wrote in a post on X.