Judges, Inundated With Immigration Cases, Don’t Mince Words On Ice Tactics

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.”

The judges’ alarm has formed the backdrop to a broader clash between the Trump administration and Minnesota’s elected leaders, who have decried the operation that has led to the shooting deaths of two U.S. citizens by federal agents. Those deaths, followed by unproven claims and factually disputed accusations about the circumstances by Trump administration officials, have inflamed tensions across the nation and become the flashpoint in a larger battle for the identity of America.

Spokespeople for the Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Judges who are now weighing those larger cases have already seen their dockets swamped by individual immigration cases arising from Operation Metro Surge.

They include Kate Menendez, who recently ordered ICE to refrain from using retaliatory force against protesters. Her order was later blocked by the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals. The Biden-appointed judge is holding an even more significant hearing Monday, in the state’s effort to end Operation Metro Surge altogether.

“I think it kind of goes without saying that we are in shockingly unusual times,” Menendez said at the start of Monday’s hearing.

Menendez’s comment came just three days after she ordered the release of a Kenyan woman arrested while picking up seizure medication at a CVS, saying the administration lacked a legal basis to lock her up.

Another judge, Trump appointee Eric Tostrud, issued a restraining order on Saturday requiring the Trump administration to preserve evidence gathered from the scene of Alex Pretti’s shooting death. He is also weighing a class action lawsuit against racial profiling during the surge. Tostrud’s docket has been deluged with individual immigration cases for weeks, and he has ruled in every one of them that the administration had been illegally detaining people targeted for deportation without the opportunity for bond hearings.

The massive workload facing Minnesota judges may actually understate the impact of Operation Metro Surge: Department of Homeland Security officials have been quickly transferring some detainees out of state — often to deportation staging areas in Texas — which prevents them from filing for relief in Minnesota courts.

That was the case in another petition handled by Davis, who expressed shock at the administration’s treatment of a Burmese woman with three children, including a five-month-old baby, and a heart condition. The woman, who was admitted as a refugee in 2024, was abruptly moved to Texas after her Jan. 10 arrest. Davis ordered her return on Friday.

“There is simply no legal reason for keeping this mother 1800 miles away from her children,” the Clinton appointee said. “While the Court recognizes that many families are suffering due to … ICE actions in the District of Minnesota, there is something particularly craven about transferring a nursing refugee mother out-of-state.”

In a Saturday ruling, U.S. District Judge John Gerrard — a Nebraska-based judge helping Minnesota work through its crowded docket — ordered the release of a pregnant woman apprehended on her way to work, as well as her husband and two minor sons. The Trump administration signaled it was “attempting to locate” the family, and Gerrard gave them until Monday night to comply.

A second visiting judge, Missouri-based Stephen Bough, threatened contempt sanctionsagainst the administration for sending a woman out of state despite his order to keep her in Minnesota.

The most common challenge raised by ICE’s targets is that they have been detained without due process — often arrested without a warrant and without the opportunity for bond hearings to remain released while deportation proceedings are pending. Judges across the country have overwhelmingly rejected the Trump administration’s bid to lock up nearly everyone it is targeting for deportation — a sharp break from every administration of the last 30 years, which prioritized detention only for those deemed dangerous or likely to flee.

A POLITICO analysis has identified 347 judges across the country who have rejected the administration’s detention policy — in more than 2,400 cases — while just 20 judges have sided with the administration, a small minority that has nevertheless grown in recent weeks. The emergency nature of the cases has so far stymied efforts to get appeals courts or the Supreme Court to weigh in on the policy, which has resulted in district courts’ dockets being clogged across the country. Hundreds of new emergency petitions for release are filed every day.

The judges in Minnesota are now bearing the brunt of the deluge. All but one — the Reagan-appointed Judge Paul Magnuson— have rejected the administration’s mass detention policy. And their frustrations are beginning to spill into the open more frequently.

Davis, in a third recently decided case, vented that the administration appeared not to be affording bond hearings to its targets — even after federal judges had ordered them.

“There has been an undeniable move by the Government in the past month to defy court orders or at least to stretch the legal process to the breaking point in an attempt to deny noncitizens their due process rights,” Davis wrote in a Sunday ruling. “With the evidence currently before the Court, it can only conclude that Respondents are attempting to ‘undermin[e] the regulatory and statutory authority of the immigration courts to coerce perpetual, infinite detention.’”

But it was the direct confrontation between the Trump administration and Minnesota’s chief federal judge, Patrick Schiltz, that laid bare the most obvious tensions. The George W. Bush appointee, in two Friday letters to the 8th Circuit, accused the administration of a “frivolous” bid to force the arrest of former CNN anchor Don Lemon and others linked to an anti-ICE demonstration at a St. Paul church.

“I am also dealing with a number of emergencies, including a lockdown at the Minneapolis courthouse because of protest activity, the defiance of several court orders by ICE, and the illegal detention of many detainees by ICE,” Schiltz wrote.