The Department of Justice may have suffered a major setback in a hearing on Monday morning, as lawyers for the Donald Trump administration opposed a motion seeking a temporary restraining order that would severely curtail ICE activities in Minnesota.
According to MS NOW’s Lisa Rubin, U.S. District Judge Katherine Menendez gave every indication that she might not rule entirely the way the state of Minnesota seeks.
However, she added that a letter from Attorney General Pam Bondi to Gov. Tim Walz (D) got the judge's attention, and not in a good way.
Following the killing of 37-year-old Alex Pretti, Bondi reached out with a “restore the rule of law” in Minneapolis letter where she called on the state to repeal its “sanctuary policies” and allow ICE agents to “remove illegal aliens in custody of Minnesota’s prisons and jails.”
She also demanded that the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division be given access to the state’s voter rolls and urged the state to share its records on Medicaid and Food and Nutrition Service programs in return for reining in ICE.
According to Rubin, Menendez expressed her displeasure with the demands.
“In particular, Judge Menendez seemed to be really offended by the letter from Attorney General Pam Bondi to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, where she identified three different policies that she said were they to change, Minnesotans might see a difference on the ground. Some of those policies, as you know, have nothing to do with immigration at all,” Rubin told host Chris Jansing.
"She also drilled the DFOJ lawyer to explain which policies the state and the cities have that you believe are impeding ICE from conducting its enforcement operations on the ground,” she added. “The DOJ lawyer really struggled to identify those. He kept referring back to a declaration from a senior ICE official on the ground, but was not particularly nimble or facile with the details, which should have been the government's principal argument.”