The outcome should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the Constitution and the Tenth Amendment, on which Minnesota AG Keith Ellison relied for his lawsuit. What may come as a surprise is that not even the normally sympathetic federal judge hearing the case would swallow it.
Judge Katherine Menendez, a Biden-appointed jurist whose recent stay on ICE operations got sharply overturned by the Eighth Circuit, threw in the towel early this time. She ruled that Minnesota couldn’t make its case for judicial intervention to stop Operation Metro Surge, the Homeland Security effort to find violent illegal-alien criminals released by state and local authorities into the Twin Cities:
The surge of immigration agents into Minnesota can continue, a federal judge ruled on Saturday.
Why it matters: The decision is a win for the Trump administration, which has argued that “Operation Metro Surge” has “succeeded” with thousands of arrests.
- The decision, from U.S. District Judge Katherine Menendez, comes just days after 37-year-old Minneapolis nurse Alex Pretti was shot and killed by federal agents.
What she’s saying: “Ultimately, the Court finds that the balance of harms does not decisively favor an injunction,” the judge said.
Menendez’ ruling takes 30 pages to unroll, but the first two paragraphs explain the issue:
In recent weeks, several thousand federal agents have arrived in Minnesota and its two largest cities as part of “Operation Metro Surge,” an immigration enforcement campaign. The flood of federal agents has had profound effects on Minnesotans, requiring the state and the cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul to respond in many ways. In thiscase, Plaintiffs (the State of Minnesota, Minneapolis, and Saint Paul), ask the Court to declare that the unprecedented surge of Defendants’ agents in Minnesota is unconstitutional and unlawful, and enter an injunction halting Operation Metro Surge. (Dkt. 1 at 76–77.1)
To that end, Plaintiffs filed a Motion for a Temporary Restraining Order (Dkt. 7), which the Court converted to a motion for a preliminary injunction (Dkt. 21). The Court pauses to observe what it is not deciding. At this stage, the Court makes no final determination on the merits of any claims asserted by Plaintiffs. Nor does the Court offer any opinion about the wisdom of Operation Metro Surge. And the legality of many of the specific actions taken by federal agents during the operation is not before the Court in this case. Instead, the Court only decides whether to grant the extraordinary remedy of a preliminary injunction halting a federal law enforcement operation based upon the Tenth Amendment. In answering this question, the Court must view Plaintiffs’ claims through the lens of the specific legal framework they invoke, and, having done so, finds that Plaintiffs have not met their burden. For the reasons discussed below, the motion is denied.
The Tenth Amendment itself seems like a rather strange foundation for a demand to stop an immigration enforcement action. The Tenth Amendment text reads: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” The problem with this foundation is obvious, as the US Constitution expressly reserves the issues of ‘common defense’ and ‘naturalization’ to the federal government in Article I, Section 8. That has long been read to include immigration policy. The Supreme Court has long made that jurisdiction clear, most recently in 2012’s US v Arizona, which invalidated Arizona’s attempt to enforce immigration laws on its own.
In other words, Minnesota doesn’t have a Tenth Amendment claim here. It actually invalidates any authority they claim to control immigration enforcement operations. The lawsuit tries to cure that problem by claiming that the operation is so extensive as to violate the “anti-commandeering” aspect of the Tenth Amendment, in which enforcement of federal regulations requires the use of state or local resources. Menendez doesn’t buy it:
Insofar as Plaintiffs’ Tenth Amendment claims do not challenge the constitutionality of any federal statute, Defendants’ challenged conduct does not fit neatly into the clearly defined prohibitions on the exercise of federal authority. Instead, Plaintiffs ask the Court to extend existing precedent to a new context where its application is less direct—namely, to an unprecedented deployment of armed federal immigration officers to aggressively enforce immigration statutes. None of thecases on which they rely have even come close. While the novelty of Plaintiffs’ claims does not necessarily preclude their ultimate success on the merits, it weighs against the propriety of preliminary injunctive relief.
Nor did Ellison convince Menendez that the surge of federal agents was only punitive in nature. After acknowledging that some statements from Trump officials can be read in that manner, the truth is that the federal government also has a competing argument that Minnesota’s refusal to cooperate at all with ICE detainers and operations rationally justifies the increase in personnel to achieve a lawful and constitutional objective, emphasis mine:
Before its outset, several Executive Branch officials emphasized that Operation Metro Surge was a necessary response to allegations of widespread fraud in Minnesota against government programs. (Dkt. 1 ¶¶ 55–59 (citing statements from President Trump and other ExecutiveBranch officials tying enforcement actions to alleged “fraud” in Minnesota).) Defendants have introduced evidence that the operation was also launched to increase arrests of noncitizens with criminal convictions in Minnesota and the Twin Cities, an effort they claim has been hindered by Plaintiffs’ refusal to assist with federal immigration enforcement efforts. (See Olson Decl. ¶¶ 14–18; Harvick Decl. ¶ 7; cf. Dkt. 1 ¶ 113.17) Based on the record before the Court, a factfinder could reasonably credit that Plaintiffs’ sanctuary policies require a greater presence of federal agents to achieve the federal government’s immigration enforcement objectives than in a jurisdiction that actively assists ICE. (See Olson Decl. ¶¶ 8–13; see also Harvick Decl. ¶ 16 (indicating that aninjunction would limit CBP’s ability to arrest and detain noncitizens with criminalrecords).) Because there is evidence supporting both sides’ arguments as to motivation and the relative merits of each side’s competing positions are unclear, the Court is reluctant to find that the likelihood-of-success factor weighs sufficiently in favor of granting a preliminary injunction.
Also, Menendez points to another Supreme Court decision in 2023, US v Texas, in which the court dismissed a lawsuit from both Texas and Louisiana that demanded more enforcement of immigration law in their states by the federal government. The court ruled that the states lacked standing to sue as they had no authority to direct federal enforcement policies, even when those policies imposed significant costs on the states. “If such downstream costs of Executive Branch enforcement decisions do not constitute an injury in fact sufficient for states to have standing to sue,” Menendez notes, “it seems unlikely that the effect of such costs could form the basis of a Tenth Amendment anticommandeering violation.”
In other words, Minnesota just got hoist by the precedential petards of the Obama and Biden years.
With this dismissal, Tim Walz has little choice now but to begin cooperating with Tom Homan, ICE, and Border Patrol. They won’t win this Tenth Amendment argument on further review, and they know it.
Editor’s Note: Democrat politicians and their radical supporters will do everything they can to interfere with and threaten ICE agents enforcing our immigration laws.
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