Operation Metro Surge, the Trump administration campaign that has targeted the city of Minneapolis and the state of Minnesota, which I serve as attorney general, appears to be the single largest deployment of immigration agents in the history of the United States. This domestic invasion has inflicted tremendous damage on our state.
Federal agents have killed two people in two weeks—Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old poet and mother of three, and Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse who worked at the Minneapolis VA hospital. (There has been at least one additional nonlethal shooting.)
Agents have stopped countless numbers of people and demanded, in effect, that they show their papers—in America. We have seen door-to-door searches where agents barge into people’s homes without cause. We have seen stores shuttered, markets shut down, restaurants under siege, employees afraid to go to work, and students afraid to go to school. We will be living with the scars from these abuses for years to come.
That is why my office sued the Trump administration. We sought a restraining order to halt Operation Metro Surge in its tracks. The lawsuit that we filed was, to my mind, necessitated by the federal government’s unprecedented abuse of the Constitution and by President Trump’s overt promise of “retribution” against the state of Minnesota. We have been able to marshal facts to show that the reason Trump’s domestic army has flooded our state is not because we have an especially large population of undocumented immigrants. Rather, we have been targeted because Trump sees us as his political enemy. That is a violation of our First Amendment right to free expression.
In addition, the 10th Amendment gives Minnesota dual sovereignty with the federal government. Yet we have seen the White House try to force elected leaders to bend to its will rather than to the will of the people of our state. The federal government has deployed more than 3,000 masked and heavily armed agents to achieve what Congress or a court would never grant: coerced control over the politics of Minnesotans.
People may ask, “Why is Minnesota having to deal with this targeted oppression?” One answer is that we voted against the president three elections in a row—something he has publicly said he resents deeply. But there’s a deeper, truer answer: Trump has gone after us because of who we are and what we value.
We welcome strangers. We see refugees as cherished members of our community, not as threats. We take care of the vulnerable among us. We want to be a great place for everyone to live—no matter where they come from. And, while we of course believe in the rule of law, we also believe that immigration is not a sin.
In short, Trump hates us because we love each other.
To those watching this madness unfold from elsewhere in America: I submit to you that just as Portland and Chicago and Los Angeles were precursors to Minneapolis, Minneapolis is a precursor to a whole lot of other cities and states, including Maine, that Trump has his eye on. If we don’t stop this behavior in Minnesota, it will only expand—and that won’t be good for anyone in our country.
We need to recognize that this is a constitutional test for Minnesota and for the entire nation. This reality has led me to think a good deal recently about first principles, and about the very premises on which this nation was founded.
Think about how things started. Ask yourself: What happened at the Boston Massacre in 1770? Imperial British agents, under orders from a faraway power, were sent to a local community and shot down protesters. The framers of the Constitution had experienced that abuse and many others. When they wrote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, they had in mind powerful central governments that used force against communities and the people who live in them. Those were the concerns that led them to establish the separation of powers and our system of federalism.
The very purpose of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights was to stop the kind of events that are going on in Minneapolis right now. These founding principles are now under attack. We were told that this could happen. In The Federalist Papers, we were warned that unscrupulous, unethical leaders could arise, and that they had to be restrained. We were told that if you have a corrupt federal authority that allows federal agents to commit crimes with impunity, local authorities have the right and the prerogative and the obligation to do something about it.
As the attorney general of Minnesota, I am prepared to take my obligation to the people I serve, and to the Constitution of the United States, seriously. I have the obligation to do something about it. And I have the duty to stand with my fellow Minnesotans, and with all Americans who value peace, justice, and the rule of law. If we do that—if we stand together, work together, resist together—we will win.
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