A federal judge in Minnesota declined to rule immediately on Wednesday on a request by state and local officials to temporarily block a surge of immigration agents to the Minneapolis area.
The Minnesota Attorney General’s Office had asked Judge Kate M. Menendez to issue a temporary restraining order that would curb the Trump administration’s mass deployment of immigration agents to the state, claiming that the federal action was unconstitutional and violated state sovereignty.
Instead, Judge Menendez gave Justice Department lawyers until Monday to respond in writing to the state’s lawsuit, and she suggested that she might hold another hearing on the issue later in January.
The federal-state legal face-off came as immigration agents continued to operate on Minnesota streets, part of a campaign that started in late November and ramped up last week. Federal immigration officials have said that they have arrested around 2,400 people in Minnesota since Nov. 29, many of whom they said had been convicted of serious crimes. Some 3,000 federal agents were said to be working in Minnesota or on their way to the state, a mobilization that federal officials have described as their largest so far.
Scenes of federal agents in masks, detaining immigrants and clashing with protesters, have angered residents and politicians in the heavily Democratic Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. Tensions intensified last week after an agent fatally shot Renee Nicole Good on a Minneapolis street. Local and federal leaders have described the killing in starkly different terms.
The Trump administration has defended its surge as necessary to crack down on illegal immigration and root out fraud in Minnesota social service programs. In a statement on Wednesday, Tricia McLaughlin, a Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman, criticized what she described as “dangerous sanctuary policies” in Minnesota that release “criminal illegal aliens from jails and put them back on the streets to victimize more innocent Americans.”
Minnesota leaders have said that the deployment amounts to a federal “occupation.”
During the court hearing on Wednesday, Brian Carter, a lawyer for the state, urged Judge Menendez to act quickly on the request to block the surge. He described violent encounters between agents and residents, saying that “the harm here is ongoing, your honor, and it is intolerable.”
“The temperature needs to be lowered,” said Mr. Carter, who called for a “pause.”
A lawyer for the Trump administration, Andrew Warden, asked the judge to take a slower approach. He described portions of the state’s proposed order as vague, and another section as “extraordinarily intrusive.”
Judge Menendez, who was nominated by former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to serve in the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota, said she was not going to make an immediate decision and wanted to give the federal government time to more fully reply to the state’s claims. She described the issues raised in the lawsuit as “grave and important matters,” but said they “are somewhat frontier issues in constitutional law,” with a limited amount of precedent to draw upon.
Officials in Illinois, another Democratic-led state that has been a target of the administration’s immigration enforcement campaign, filed a separate federal lawsuit on Monday with claims similar to those in Minnesota. A judge has not yet ruled in that case.
Madeleine Ngo contributed reporting.
Mitch Smith is a Chicago-based national correspondent for The Times, covering the Midwest and Great Plains.
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