Minnesota's effort to end the surge is rejected as journalists are arrested, but pushback continues

As Operation Metro Surge continued on the streets of the Twin Cities, a federal judge on Saturday rejected a request from Minnesota, Minneapolis, St. Paul to end the Trump administration’s extreme immigration enforcement effort immediately.

Under the surge, the Department of Homeland Security has sent about 3,000 federal officials to Minnesota this winter — upending life in the Twin Cities and prompting extensive pushback. Among the countless harms, the federal agents deployed to the state have killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

The ambitious case featured an argument that, through the surge and in light of Trump administration’s statements about it, the federal government was violating the Tenth Amendment’s anti-commandeering principle and Minnesota’s constitutional right to equal sovereignty.

U.S. District Judge Katherine Menendez, a Biden appointee, noted the limited contexts in which the Tenth Amendment has been employed by the U.S. Supreme Court before concluding that, for now, she was unwilling 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.”

As to the state’s argument that the Trump administration’s statements regarding the surge provide sufficient evidence for a finding that the surge is impermissible coercion under the Tenth Amendment, Menendez concluded that “the inferences to be drawn regarding the allegedly coercive purpose of Operation Metro Surge are not as one-sided as Plaintiffs suggest.”

As Menendez wrote:

Plaintiffs argue that Defendants are carrying out Operation Metro Surge in brazenly lawless ways specifically to coerce Plaintiffs into modifying or repealing their “sanctuary” laws and ordinances and otherwise cooperate with the Executive, thereby commandeering Plaintiffs’ legislative processes. Plaintiffs certainly have put forth evidence to support this theory, including Attorney General [Pam] Bondi’s letter to Governor [Tim] Walz, which states as much, and other statements by Defendants and other Executive Branch officials.

Despite that, Menendez continued, “there is also support that cuts the other way,“ specifically “other motivations behind Operation Metro Surge,” including a carefully caveated statement from Menendez: “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.”

From there, Menendez concluded, “Because there is evidence supporting both sides’ arguments as to motivation and the relative merits of each side’s competing positions are unclear, the