Immigration Enforcement Is Federal. So Why Can’t States Stop These Operations?

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A federal judge’s ruling denying Minnesota’s emergency request exposes something uncomfortable about how American federalism works: federal courts can see harm and document it, but still refuse to act.

The Legal Test That Blocks Emergency Relief

To get a preliminary injunction—a court order stopping something while the case proceeds—you need to clear four hurdles. You must show you’re likely to win on the merits eventually. You must show irreparable harm without the injunction. The balance of hardships must favor you. And an injunction must serve the public interest.

Minnesota cleared some of these hurdles easily. The state was hemorrhaging money on police overtime, which is irreparable harm.

But the likelihood-of-success requirement is where Minnesota’s case hit a wall. The federal government had offered plausible law-enforcement justifications. The existence of competing arguments—even if one side’s arguments were weaker—meant the court couldn’t conclude Minnesota was likely to prevail when the case was ultimately decided.

This creates a catch-22. The worse the immediate harm, the more urgent the need for relief. But the more contested the underlying legal question, the less likely a court will grant that relief. Emergency help is blocked in exactly the cases where it’s most needed—because those are the cases where legal precedent is unclear.

Separation of Powers and Judicial Supervision

Even if Minnesota had cleared the likelihood-of-success hurdle, the court identified a second problem: how to write an order that would work.

If a court orders federal agents to stop operations, what does that mean? Do federal agents have to leave Minnesota entirely? Can they conduct operations at some reduced level? Who decides what level is acceptable? The court would effectively become a supervisor of federal law enforcement, reviewing and approving or disapproving decisions on an ongoing basis.

Courts invoke similar concerns about court orders requiring ongoing judicial supervision whenever they’re asked to issue orders requiring ongoing oversight of executive operations. In this context, the micromanagement concern creates a ratchet effect: if courts can’t regulate specific tactics like pepper spray use, they certainly can’t regulate the overall scope of a federal operation.

What the Tenth Amendment Protects (And Doesn’t)

Minnesota’s primary legal theory rested on the rule against forcing states to do federal work. Congress cannot compel states to enforce federal law or divert state resources to federal purposes without compensation.

The problem is that this doctrine has a significant gap. It prevents the federal government from forcing state officials to do federal work. It doesn’t prevent the federal government from doing its own work within state borders, even if that work has spillover effects on state resources.

Minnesota argued that the sheer scale of federal operations—forcing state police to spend thousands of overtime hours managing consequences—constituted a kind of indirect commandeering. But the court was skeptical it could draw a workable line between “large federal operations with incidental state impacts” and “unconstitutional commandeering.” Where would that line be? 1,000 agents? 2,000? What if the federal government deployed 10,000 agents? At what point does scale transform a permissible federal operation into an unconstitutional burden on state sovereignty?

Without a principle for drawing that line, the court couldn’t grant relief.

Alternative Legal Strategies Minnesota Could Pursue

The denial of a preliminary injunction isn’t a final judgment on Minnesota’s constitutional claims.

On appeal, Minnesota might shift strategies. The commandeering theory struggled because it required courts to define when federal operations become “too large.” But the principle that states should be treated equally asks a simpler question: why did the federal government treat Minnesota differently from other states? If Minnesota received disparate treatment without adequate justification, this principle might provide a path to relief that doesn’t require courts to micromanage federal operations.

Another avenue: claims that federal agencies violated their own rules. The Administrative Procedure Act requires federal agencies to follow their own procedures and to act rationally—not based on whim or without good reason. If Minnesota can show the decision to deploy agents to Minneapolis lacked rational law-enforcement justification and was instead driven by political considerations, an APA claim might succeed where constitutional arguments struggle. APA claims don’t require courts to find constitutional violations—only whether an agency followed proper procedures and acted reasonably. A finding that DHS violated APA requirements wouldn’t require ongoing judicial management—only a one-time determination that the agency must reconsider its decision.

Minnesota might also request narrower relief on appeal. Instead of halting operations entirely, the state could ask for specific restrictions: warrant requirements for residential searches, prohibitions on racial profiling, restrictions on operations near schools and hospitals. Courts are generally more willing to ban specific practices than to shut down entire operations.

Illinois’s Parallel Lawsuit and Different Strategy

Minnesota isn’t alone. Illinois filed a separate lawsuit against DHS, also challenging federal immigration operations. Illinois’s complaint emphasizes APA violations and focuses on how federal actions have disrupted core state functions including education, healthcare, and judicial operations.

By adding APA claims alongside constitutional arguments, Illinois is asking courts to examine whether the federal government followed proper procedures—a potentially more viable legal strategy than relying primarily on Tenth Amendment theories. Illinois filed later than Minnesota, potentially learning from Minnesota’s preliminary injunction hearing. At least nineteen other states have reportedly been monitoring these cases. If either Minnesota or Illinois achieves legal success, expect rapid adoption of similar suits invoking the successful theories.

The Eighth Circuit’s Approach to Federal Power

Minnesota’s appeal will go to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, which has demonstrated particular skepticism toward broad injunctions against federal operations. However, the circuit has occasionally recognized state sovereign interests and limited federal actions that interfere with state authority.

What may prove decisive is how the Eighth Circuit characterizes the factual circumstances. Minnesota isn’t challenging routine operations—it’s challenging a deployment unprecedented in scale and scope. If the appellate court can be persuaded this genuinely extraordinary situation requires judicial recognition of state concerns, Minnesota’s legal theories might gain traction. The argument wouldn’t be that the federal government cannot enforce immigration law, but that when enforcement reaches a scale that functionally disables core state operations and causes documented civilian harm, courts must examine whether the federal decision-making process adequately considered those impacts and whether legitimate law-enforcement justifications support the deployment.

When Legal Frameworks Don’t Address Unprecedented Actions

The opinion raises an uncomfortable possibility: existing legal frameworks may not be adequate to address genuinely unprecedented federal actions.

The court recognized this was unprecedented, recognized it caused severe harm, but found that available legal doctrines—developed in different contexts—don’t translate cleanly to this situation. The court was saying, in effect: I see the problem, but the legal tools available to me weren’t designed for this, and I can’t stretch them to grant relief without violating separation-of-powers principles myself.

If legal change is coming, it may need to come from the Supreme Court or Congress rather than through district court litigation. The Supreme Court has different institutional capacity for recognizing new limitations on federal power. Congress could enact legislation conditioning federal funding on compliance with procedural requirements—notice, impact assessment, environmental review—that would constrain surges. Absent such changes, the current legal framework creates a genuine gap between acknowledged harm and available remedy.

The Political Conflict Over Sanctuary Policies

The litigation reflects a deeper tension about American federalism itself. Minnesota, as a sanctuary jurisdiction, had enacted policies limiting state and local cooperation with federal immigration operations. The Trump administration’s response was to bypass those policies entirely by deploying massive federal operations directly within the state.

The federal position: the government has essentially unlimited authority to enforce immigration law within state borders, and states cannot prevent federal operations regardless of scale or consequences.

This creates genuine constitutional tension. Federal immigration authority is indeed broad—Congress has wide power to determine immigration policy, and the executive has wide latitude to implement it. Yet the Constitution’s structure also contemplates that states retain significant remaining powers, and the Tenth Amendment reflects the principle that powers not delegated to the federal government are reserved to states.

The question: at what point does federal power exercised within state borders so fundamentally undermine a state’s ability to govern that federalism principles should constrain federal action? The opinion doesn’t answer this. It says courts aren’t the appropriate forum for raising this question at the preliminary injunction stage. But the question persists.

Implications for State Challenges to Federal Power

The rejection of Minnesota’s preliminary injunction will likely discourage some states from pursuing emergency relief while encouraging others to develop alternative strategies. Immigration advocates and state officials monitoring the case will interpret the ruling as establishing that federal courts are unlikely to halt operations through preliminary injunctions, even at unprecedented scale with documented harm.

For federal agencies, the ruling may be read as a green light. The unwillingness to enjoin operations despite documented consequences suggests courts won’t readily intervene in federal decisions on federalism grounds.

The ruling also raises questions about mechanisms available to states challenging federal power. The Constitution’s structure contemplates that states can challenge federal actions in federal court. But if courts are reluctant to grant interim relief, and if full merits litigation takes years, what meaningful remedy do states have while federal actions are ongoing? Operations will likely conclude long before any final judgment on constitutional claims. If federal agencies can implement major operations without fear of preliminary judicial intervention, federalism litigation becomes unable to protect states from ongoing harm.

This suggests future state strategies might increasingly focus on APA claims, which can sometimes generate preliminary injunctions more readily than constitutional claims, or on seeking damages for state costs rather than orders stopping something from happening in the future. States might also pursue remedies in state courts, seeking to enforce state law against federal officials or recover costs—an under-explored avenue for state litigation.

How Judicial Gatekeeping Works in Practice

The ruling reveals how judicial gatekeeping works in practice: courts can acknowledge unprecedented harm without finding that harm sufficient to justify emergency intervention. The court didn’t dismiss Minnesota’s concerns, didn’t deny documented harms occurred, didn’t hold federal power is absolute.

But by maintaining a strict distinction between acknowledging harm and finding likelihood of success on the merits, and by raising micromanagement concerns that appear to apply broadly to any court order requiring ongoing oversight of federal operations, the court illustrated how existing legal doctrines systematically filter out emergency relief even in extraordinary circumstances.

Whether this gatekeeping is appropriate depends on your view of federal power and state sovereignty. Were concerns about judicial micromanagement legitimate protections against inappropriate judicial intervention? Or did they reflect excessive deference to federal power that inadequately protects state sovereignty and individual rights? The answer will vary depending on which court is asked and which legal theory is emphasized.

Minnesota’s appeal will test whether appellate courts apply different standards, whether the full case reveals violations the preliminary stage didn’t adequately address, and whether any legal theory can overcome the systematic gatekeeping that makes judicial intervention in federal operations so difficult to obtain.

For states contemplating future litigation, Minnesota’s case provides a sobering message: federal courts are unlikely to halt ongoing operations through preliminary injunctions, even at unprecedented scale with documented harm. But it doesn’t foreclose judicial remedies entirely. Different legal theories, carefully developed and presented to courts at different stages of litigation, might succeed where Minnesota’s initial attempt struggled. The litigation roadmap runs through appellate courts, through alternative theories like the APA and equal sovereignty, and through the question of whether genuinely unprecedented circumstances might force courts to reconsider whether traditional deference doctrines adequately constrain federal power.

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