Things just KEEP Grinding on…
Judge Restricts Immigration Agents’ Actions Toward Minnesota Protesters
A federal judge ordered agents not to retaliate against people “engaging in peaceful and unobstructive protest activity” in the state and not to stop drivers who are not “forcibly obstructing” officers.
…
A federal judge in Minnesota imposed restrictions on the actions of immigration agents toward protesters in the state on Friday, a decision that comes after weeks of mounting tension between demonstrators and federal officers.
Judge Kate M. Menendez ordered agents not to retaliate against people “engaging in peaceful and unobstructive protest activity,” or 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 are not “forcibly obstructing or interfering with” agents.
The ruling, which granted a preliminary injunction, stems from a lawsuit brought by activists who said agents had violated their rights. The suit was filed before an immigration agent shot and killed Renee Good in Minneapolis on Jan. 7.
Ms. Good, 37, had partially blocked a roadway where agents were working and did not follow commands to get out of her S.U.V. As she began to drive, an agent near the front of her car opened fire…..
…
Trump Backs Down on Insurrection Act as Democrats Take the Offensive
Officials denounced the Trump immigration crackdown in Minneapolis at an unofficial congressional hearing, while the president said he no longer saw a need to send in military forces…
…
President Trump appeared to back down on Friday from his threat to send military forces into Minneapolis. But Democratic officials and activists told members of Congress that it felt as though they were already living under a military occupation.
Convoys of agents from federal immigration agencies have swarmed the city in the first two weeks of 2026, spreading fear and violating constitutional rights, officials said in testimony at an unofficial hearing in the Minnesota Senate Building. They accused the Trump administration of profiling residents of color, ripping apart immigrant families and wrongfully detaining U.S. citizens as part of a campaign of political retribution.
“There is no modern precedent for this level of federal overreach,” Representative Ilhan Omar, a Democrat who represents part of Minneapolis, told a panel of more than two dozen fellow Democratic members of Congress, describing the actions as violent and lawless….
…
Trump’s Fight With Minnesota Is About More Than Immigration
The state embodies a civic ideal that the administration in Washington wants to discredit…
…
There are plenty of obvious reasons Minneapolis, despite ranking far down the list of U.S. cities in terms of its immigrant population, is the latest Democratic-led urban area targeted by President Trump’s punitive anti-immigration raids. There is Tim Walz, the governor and Trump’s 2024 rival. There is the genuinely stunning fraud scandal, recently revealed, that happened on Walz’s watch. And there is the long shadow of George Floyd. But to understand both the crackdown and its stakes, it’s also worth revisiting a speech Trump gave in the city in November 2016, two days before the election that would first deliver him to the White House.
“Oh, Minnesota,” Trump told the crowd, dropping into the just-you-and-me-talking mode that has always been one of his greatest assets as a politician. “You know what’s going on. You know what I’m talking about. Do you know what I’m talking about? Be politically correct. Just nod — quietly nod. The whole world knows what’s happening in Minnesota.”
What was happening in Minnesota then was a slow-burning tension surrounding the state’s Somali community, its second-largest immigrant population. In 2008, a young Somalia-born man from Minneapolis was recruited by the Somali Islamist militant group Al Shabab and detonated a car full of explosives outside a government building in his birth country’s Puntland region, the first of dozens of young men from the community who would fight for Al Shabab in Somalia and, later, for the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria over the next decade.
Minnesota had been a haven for refugees since after World War II, when it was an early destination for Holocaust survivors in the United States, and especially since the late 1970s, when it began taking in thousands of South Vietnamese and Hmong people on the wrong side of America’s withdrawal from Southeast Asia.
This hospitality had historically been a point of pride for the state, a piece of the exceptionalism that Minnesotans, performatively modest as they are, have always claimed. It was a product of a broader, deep-rooted civic idealism: the state’s preponderance of religious charities, community-level nonprofit organizations and in particular its Nordic-style social safety net, among the most generous in the country.
But amid the Shabab and ISIS recruitment, Minnesotans had grown ambivalent. A 2014 poll found that while the state’s residents were broadly supportive of immigration, less than half supported welcoming Somali immigrants……
…
This has been true nationally, too. The response to Trump’s first year back in office has made clear that ambivalence and opposition are not the same thing. It is hard to think of a federal action that has become more unpopular more quickly than Trump’s immigration raids. Last February, a YouGov poll for The Economistfound that a plurality of independent voters — 42 percent of them — had a favorable view of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In a poll conducted the day of Renee Good’s shooting, 56 percent of independents disapproved of the agency’s work, 44 percent of them strongly.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.