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A federal appeals court on Monday left in place its ruling against limiting federal agents’ actions against protesters and observers in Minnesota.
It’s the latest in a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union alleging that federal agents are violating protesters’ and observers’ rights amid the ongoing surge of federal immigration agents to Minnesota.
A federal judge had issued an earlier injunction in the case, barring agents from interfering with peaceful protesters. That included detaining protesters and observers who had not committed a crime, and using crowd control methods like pepper spray and nonlethal munitions.
But the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals put that injunction on holdshortly after. The court said the order was too vague, after attorneys for the federal government argued that the injunction could limit agents’ ability to defend themselves and control crowds.
The ACLU asked the court to reconsider after the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti by federal agents on Saturday, citing “escalating, imminent risks” to protesters and observers. Attorneys for the ACLU submitted statements from two witnesses to that shooting, alleging that Pretti did not pose a threat to agents.
In its ruling Monday, the appeals court declined to reinstate the order limiting agents’ responses to protesters and observers. In their opinion, the judges wrote that the category of protesters and observers that the initial injunction seeks to protect is too broad, as protesters behave differently toward federal agents.
The judges also wrote that the injunction’s requirements for federal agents “are simply commands to ‘obey the law,’ which are ‘not specific enough.’”
The case will continue through an appeals process.
A Myanmar refugee nursing a five-month-old, arrested and shipped to Texas. A Mexican man who sustained severe skull injuries during an arrest by ICE and was shackled in the hospital against doctors’ wishes. A Kenyan woman detained after picking up seizure medication. A Ukrainian refugee arrested for no apparent reason.
In other words, an ordinary weekend for federal judges in Minnesota during Operation Metro Surge, the Trump administration’s mass deportation push in the Twin Cities.
The district’s seven full-time judges and 10 partially retired judges have been inundated by hundreds of emergency lawsuits from immigrants targeted by ICE during the operation. They’re working weekends to manage the backlog and juggling a crush of individual cases under intense national attention.
And in all but a handful of cases, those judges have ruled that the Trump administration violated the law, sometimes flagrantly.
The judges, representing appointees of nearly every president since Ronald Reagan, have grown increasingly alarmed by what they see as a pattern of defiance by the administration, shocking behavior by ICE and rampant targeting of people with no criminal history, despite Trump’s claim to be targeting “the worst of the worst.”
“Since November 2025, the courts of this District have thought of little else,” Judge Michael Davis said in a Sunday ruling criticizing the Trump administration’s “disingenuous” claim that one of his colleagues had given only a cursory review of its arguments. “It is a grave error to confuse efficiency with lack of rigor.”