A US judge delivered a blow Saturday to Minnesota's bid to force Immigration and Customs Enforcement to suspend its sweeping detention and deportation operation in the state that has left two US citizens dead and fueled massive protests.
But while the federal court denied the state's bid to immediately halt the operation, a judge in a separate case delivered a stinging rebuke of the government and ordered authorities to release a five-year-old Minnesota boy and his father who were detained during the immigration crackdown.
"The case has its genesis in the ill-conceived and incompetently-implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children," US District Judge Fred Biery wrote.
Masked and heavily armed federal agents have swept through Minnesota communities seeking undocumented migrants, detaining thousands and shooting dead two US citizens in the process.
The heavy-handed campaign championed by President Donald Trump has sparked outrage across the United States, with tens of thousands marching in Minnesota on Friday against the operation dubbed Metro Surge.
On Minnesota's bid to obtain a temporary restraining order to end the federal operation, judge Katherine Menendez wrote in a ruling that "ultimately, the Court finds that the balance of harms does not decisively favor an injunction."
Minnesota argues that the month-long federal operation violated its sovereignty as a state.
Menendez said she was not making a final judgment on the state's overall case in her decision, something that would follow arguments in court.
She also made no determination on whether the immigration crackdown in the state had broken the law.
- 'Would-be authoritarian king' -
The killings of protesters Renee Good and Alex Pretti by masked, heavily armed agents sparked a nationwide outcry after which Trump withdrew combative Customs and Border Protection commander Gregory Bovino and replaced him with his border point man Tom Homan who pledged to draw down the operation, with conditions.
The case of Liam Conejo Ramos, 5, who was detained on January 20, has also stoked outrage.
Immigration officers seeking to arrest the boy's Ecuadoran father, Adrian Conejo Arias, took the pair into custody outside their Minneapolis home as Liam returned from preschool. The pair, both asylum seekers, have been held at a facility in Texas since then.
Biery ordered authorities to release them by Tuesday, according to a court order seen by AFP.
In the opinion accompanying the order, Biery wrote that the plaintiffs "seek nothing more than some modicum of the process and the rule of law."
He criticized what he called the government's apparent "ignorance" of the US Declaration of Independence that "enumerated grievances against a would-be authoritarian king over our nascent nation."
He also cited the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution which protects the right against "unreasonable searches and seizures."
Ahead of Saturday's ruling on the state's case to seek an end to the ICE crackdown, Hamline University politics and legal studies professor David Schultz said Minnesota was arguing that the national government was "trying to force or coerce the state into doing certain things."
"Attorney General Pam Bondi sent a letter to the state of Minnesota after Alex Pretti was killed and said, 'Well, if you want the ICE operations to stop, we want you to do this, this and this.' It kind of read like a threat," Schultz said.
The mayor of Minneapolis, Minnesota's largest city and the main target of the immigration raids, voiced disappointment over the ruling.
"This decision doesn't change what people here have lived through -- fear, disruption, and harm caused by a federal operation that never belonged in Minneapolis in the first place," Mayor Jacob Frey said in a statement.
Bondi said, in response to the ruling, that "neither sanctuary policies nor meritless litigation will stop the Trump Administration from enforcing federal law in Minnesota."
Minneapolis is a "sanctuary" city where local police do not cooperate with federal immigration officials.
Commented