Jan. 31 (UPI) — Minnesota and the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul lost their bid to have a federal court order the Department of Homeland Security to end its immigration enforcement effort in the state.
U.S. District Court of Minnesota Judge Katherine Menendez on Saturday denied a motion to enjoin the federal government from continuing its immigration law enforcement surge in the Twin Cities.
“Even if the likelihood of success on the merits and the balance of harms each weighed more clearly in favor of plaintiffs, the court would still likely be unable to grant the relief requested: An injunction suspending Operation Metro Surge,” Menendez wrote in her 30-page ruling.
She cited a recent federal appellate court ruling that affirmed the federal government has the right to enforce federal laws over the objections of others.
“The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals recently vacated a much more circumscribed injunction, which limited one aspect of the ongoing operation, namely the way immigration officers interacted with protesters and observers,” Menedez said.
“The injunction in that case was not only much narrower than the one proposed here, but it was based on more settled precedent than that which underlies the claims now before the court,” she explained.
“Nonetheless, the court of appeals determined that the injunction would cause irreparable harm to the government because it would hamper their efforts to enforce federal law,” Menendez continued.
“If that injunction went too far, then the one at issue here — halting the entire operation — certainly would,” she concluded.
Menendez said her ruling does not address the merits of the case filed by Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison on behalf of the state and two cities, which are named as the lawsuit’s three plaintiffs.
Those claims remain to be argued and largely focus on Ellison’s claim that the federal government is undertaking an illegal operation that is intended to force state and local officials to cooperate with federal law enforcement.
Menendez said Ellison has not proven his claim, which largely relies on a 2013 ruling by the Supreme Court in a case brought by Shelby County, Ala., officials who challenged the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
The act placed additional restrictions on some states based on “their histories of racially discriminatory election administration,” Menendez said.
The Supreme Court ruled a “departure from the fundamental principle of equal sovereignty” requires the federal government to show that geographically driven laws are “sufficiently related to the problem that it targets” to be lawful, she wrote.
Ellison says that the ruling “teaches that the federal government cannot single out states for disparate treatment without strong and narrowly tailored justification,” according to Menendez.
But he does not show any other examples of a legal authority applying the “equal sovereignty ‘test'” and does not show how it would apply to a presidential administration’s decision on where to deploy federal law enforcement to “enforce duly enacted federal laws,” she said.
“There is no precedent for a court to micromanage such decisions,” and she can ‘readily imagine scenarios where the federal executive must legitimately vary its use of law enforcement resources from one state to the next,” Menendez explained.
Because there is no likelihood of success in claims based on equal sovereignty, she said Ellison did not show there is a likelihood that plaintiffs will succeed in their federal lawsuit, so the motion to preliminarily enjoin the federal government from continuing Operation Metro Surge is denied.
Former President Joe Biden appointed Menendez to the federal bench in 2021.
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