Inset: President Donald Trump walks from Marine One after arriving on the South Lawn of the White House, Tuesday, July 15, 2025, in Washington (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File). Background: Demonstrators gather in south Minneapolis, Minnesota, on January 24, 2026, after a man is shot and killed by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents earlier that morning, according to officials. (Christian Zander/NurPhoto via AP).
The Trump administration's tactics against protesters in Minnesota can continue unabated, a federal appellate court ruled Monday.
In the case against the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit determined an earlier injunction "is unlikely to survive" the federal government's appeal.
In December 2025, ICE began to sweep the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul for immigrants in a massive roundup entitled "Operation Metro Surge." Later, ICE's parent agency, DHS, termed the campaign "the largest immigration enforcement operation ever carried out."
On Dec. 17, 2025, a group of Minneapolis area legal observers and protesters sued, alleging a host of constitutional violations, including First and Fourth Amendment claims, as well as a civil conspiracy claim. The 63-page lawsuit likens ICE agents in Minnesota to "the masked secret police of pre-World War II Germany or Pinochet's Chile."
At the trial court level, U.S. District Judge Katherine M. Menendez, a Joe Biden appointee, in an 83-page order, entered a preliminary injunction broadly reining in ICE's behavior by prohibiting retaliation against peaceful protesters, prohibiting the arrest or detention of observers, and barring the use of "pepper-spray or similar nonlethal munitions and crowd dispersal tools against persons who are engaging in peaceful and unobstructive protest activity."
In turn, the Trump administration appealed the trial court's order, quickly winning an administrative stay four days later in a terse, one-sentence order lacking any explanation whatsoever.
Now, the panel assigned to the case has offered some legal analysis outlining the judges' thoughts in a six-page per curiam order.
The major problem as the panel sees it is the way in which the lower court treated the plaintiffs — and all putative protesters and observers in Minnesota in general — as if they have similar injuries.
"First, the grant of relief to such a broad uncertified class is just a universal injunction by another name," the panel writes. "Even if 'courts may issue temporary relief to a putative class,' this one has no chance of getting certified."
Here, the panel restates last summer's landmark opinion from the U.S. Supreme Court in the case stylized as Trump v. Casa.
In that case, the conservative majority on the nation's high court essentially ended the practice of nationwide or "universal" injunctions — at least those authored by district court judges. At the same time, the court left open class actions as a way to obtain relief similar to that once provided by nationwide injunctions.
But in this case, the panel stresses, no class certification is in the offing due to both the actions of the government and the plaintiffs.
"We accessed and viewed the same videos the district court did," the panel explains. "What they show is observers and protestors engaging in a wide range of conduct, some of it peaceful but much of it not. They also show federal agents responding in various ways."
From the order, at length:
Even the named plaintiffs' claims involve different conduct, by different officers, at different times, in different places, in response to different behavior. These differences mean that there are no "questions of law or fact common to the class," that would allow the court to decide all their claims in "one stroke."
In other words, the appeals court is saying the lower court erred by categorizing the would-be class of plaintiffs as "peaceful" protesters. And, the panel adds, the government's response to the protesters was far too different for the plaintiffs' complaints to be generalized.
The panel also says the injunction is "too vague."
The appeals court says rather than proscribing specific activity, the injunction "simply commands" ICE agents to "obey the law." And this kind of admonition, the panel says, is "not specific enough."
The order goes on to take issue with one highly specific part of the lower court's injunction — saying the pepper spray ban "requires federal agents to predict what" the lower court would consider "peaceful and unobstructive protest activity."
Once again, the panel turned to the videos.
"The videos underscore how difficult it would be for them to decide who has crossed the line: they show a fast-changing mix of peaceful and obstructive conduct, with many protestors getting in officers' faces and blocking their vehicles as they conduct their activities, only for some of them to then rejoin the crowd and intermix with others who were merely recording and observing the scene," the order goes on.
The appeals court muses that while a "wrong call could end in contempt" from the district court "there is little in the order that constrains the district court's power to impose it." And this grant of power, the panel states, is a bit too much for a judge to wield.
"[F]ederal courts do not exercise general oversight of the Executive Branch," the order continues. "[T]he structural injunction imposed here, given its breadth and vagueness, is too big a step in that direction."
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