The US states of Minnesota and Illinois on Monday pressed lawsuits against the administration of President Donald Trump after a woman was fatally shot by a federal agent in Minneapolis last week.
Announcing the legal action, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison said the Department of Homeland Security’s surge of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers into the northern state in recent days has “made us less safe.”
What do we know about the Minnesota lawsuit?
Ellison told a press conference that “thousands of poorly trained, aggressive and armed agents of the state, of the federal government, have rolled into our communities.”
“The deployment of thousands of armed, masked DHS agents to Minnesota has done our state serious harm. This is, in essence, a federal invasion of the Twin Cities and Minnesota and it must stop,” Ellison said.
He added that Democratic-led Minnesota was being targeted for “our democracy and our differences of opinion with the federal government” in what he said was a “violation of the Constitution and federal law.”
Last week, a federal immigration officer shot and killed Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three whom US authorities accused of driving her car toward the officer. Local officials have strongly disputed the narrative, pointing to video footage from the scene which shows Good’s vehicle turning away from the agent.
“If the goal were simply to look for people who are undocumented, Minneapolis would not be the place you would go,” said city mayor Jacob Frey.
“There are countless more people that are undocumented in Florida and Texas and Utah,” he added, noting that those states are Republican-controlled.
Trump’s immigration crackdown
President Trump’s Republican administration has deployed federal law enforcement officers into several cities and states largely governed by Democrats in what Trump says is a crackdown on illegal immigration and corruption.
“For years, these corrupt, activist politicians have refused to protect Minnesotans and are now proposing illegal actions to keep their stranglehold on control and continue stealing from American citizens,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem wrote on X.
“We will root out this rampant fraud, we will arrest the criminal illegal aliens hurting Americans with impunity, and we will hold those who aid and abetted this criminality accountable.”
Ellison’s lawsuit against the Trump administration named Noem and several other US administration officials. It calls on the court to declare the surge of immigration-enforcement officers into the state of Minnesota unconstitutional.
The Illinois lawsuit is also putting forth similar demands. (DW)