Lawyers for the Trump administration said on Monday that they were appealing a judge’s injunction that imposed limits on immigration agents’ interactions with protesters in Minnesota.
In a short notice filed on Monday with the judge who issued the preliminary injunction last week, Justice Department lawyers said they would challenge those limits at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. The lawsuit that led to the injunction claimed that federal law enforcement officers had repeatedly violated the rights of protesters who observed or recorded immigration enforcement actions or voiced opposition to those actions.
In her injunction, handed down on Friday, Judge Kate M. Menendez of the U.S. District Court in Minnesota ordered agents not to retaliate against people “engaging in peaceful and unobstructive protest activity,” and not to use pepper spray or other “crowd dispersal tools” in retaliation for protected speech. The judge also said agents could not stop or detain protesters in vehicles who were not “forcibly obstructing or interfering with” agents.
Judge Menendez, who was nominated to the bench by President Joseph R. Biden Jr., did not give the plaintiffs everything they had sought in the injunction. She did not include specific protection for the recording of agents, nor did she impose rules about how agents issue dispersal orders.
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the appeal. Though a notice of appeal was filed with the district court, the full text of the appeal was not immediately available from the Eighth Circuit.
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said on Friday in a statement responding to Judge Menendez’s injunction that “D.H.S. is taking appropriate and constitutional measures to uphold the rule of law and protect our officers and the public from dangerous rioters.”
She added that despite “grave threats,” agents had “followed their training and used the minimum amount of force necessary to protect themselves, the public and federal property.”
A spokeswoman for the American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota, which backed the lawsuit, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the appeal.
The lawsuit described a “federal campaign to besiege cities across the United States in an unprecedented attack on civil liberties,” and described the case as an effort “to ensure that Minnesotans can assemble, observe, document, and criticize defendants’ activities, safely and unburdened by the fear of retaliation.”
The suit is one of several filed in recent weeks related to the surge of some 3,000 federal agents to Minnesota. The enforcement campaign has led to at least 2,400 arrests, as well as repeated clashes with protesters and two shootings, including the fatal shooting of Renee Good, a U.S. citizen who was killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Minneapolis on Jan. 7. In another incident in Minneapolis last week, a federal agent shot and injured a man who officials said was in the country illegally and had assaulted an agent with a shovel or broom.
Judge Menendez is weighing a separate lawsuit filed by the state and the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. That case claims that the surge of immigration agents is unconstitutional, and asks for an order blocking the operation from continuing. The state asked Judge Menendez to issue an immediate ruling in that case, but she declined last week to do so.
Mitch Smith is a Chicago-based national correspondent for The Times, covering the Midwest and Great Plains.
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