As masked and armed men in combat armor swarmed throughout the Twin Cities, Gov. Tim Walz took to primetime television to ask Minnesotans to film ICE. The videos, he said, would “create a database of the atrocities against Minnesotans — not just to establish a record for posterity, but to bank evidence for future prosecution.”
While the feds besieged hospitals and school bus stops and Targets, Walz imagined a future with something akin to the Nuremberg trials. His speech emphasized the legal system and the ballot box, a promise of peaceful regime change and a process of accountability. And it was as much emotional solace for his constituents as it was a demonstration for the courts. Minnesota is not in insurrection, Minnesota is not in revolt, Minnesota will follow the law — so, will the law now protect Minnesota?
The state of Minnesota, along with the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, is asking a federal judge to pause what the Trump administration is calling “Operation Metro Surge,” the descent of 2,000 masked and armed ICE agents on the Twin Cities. The lawsuit tries several different avenues to get there. It’s an uncurated shotgun blast of legal reasoning in a time of crisis. But one common thread binds it all together: states’ rights. Minnesota should have a say in what is happening on Minnesota’s turf; by locking the local authorities out and running roughshod over them, the feds have violated the basic compact of the Bill of Rights.
The feds have violated the basic compact of the Bill of Rights
It is primarily liberal states that have been targeted by Donald Trump, and liberal cities with sanctuary policies have been hit the hardest. The complaint in Minnesota v. Noem hammers at this in particular, going even further to point out the times Trump has complained about losing Minnesota in each of his presidential elections. The cities that Trump has already targeted — such as Los Angeles, Portland, and Chicago — are led by Democratic mayors. Resistance there has been fierce both on the ground and in the courts. A couple days before Christmas, the Supreme Court handed down a shadow docket decision in the National Guard cases, a rare instance in which it ruled against Trump. The president then announced his “withdrawal” from those cities (he had been prevented from deploying the Guard at all in Chicago and Portland); within days, he turned his attention to Minnesota.
“The Tenth Amendment gives the State of Minnesota and its subdivisions, including the Cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, inviolable sovereign authority to protect the health and wellbeing of all those who reside, work, or visit within their borders,” says the lawsuit, alleging that the ICE surge has paralyzed the city with fear and dysfunction.
In the logic of the lawsuit, the feds have undermined the local authorities by inflicting terror on Minnesotans: “They have the right to go to work, take their children to school, and move through public and private spaces free from fear of violence against themselves or their loved ones by their federal government. They are entitled to access city services and use city facilities without being harassed by federal agents in parking lots.”
The desire for self-determination is central to the conflict between Trump and his victims. Sanctuary cities are cities that, to some degree or another, have democratically chosen not to aid federal immigration enforcement. In that sense, of course the fight is all about states’ rights. That would be perfectly obvious.
But in another sense, the whole affair is inflected with an exhausting degree of irony. “States’ rights” has been a conservative talking point since the Civil War, lingering on and morphing into a pro-segregation dogwhistle during the Civil Rights Movement and beyond. As right-wing extremism grew in America, “states’ rights” merged with the militia movement in bizarre and incoherent ways.
An 11-day anti-government standoff in 1992, now known as Ruby Ridge, along with the Waco standoff the following year, spawned a very specific flavor of anti-government subculture. The bare facts of the Ruby Ridge standoff read like a series of hashtags from tradwife TikTok: homestead, homeschool, birthing shed. Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of Oklahoma City in 1995 was motivated in part by Ruby Ridge and Waco. Obama-era militia movements — like the militia that took over Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon in 2016 — treat Ruby Ridge and Waco as “primary symbolism” of federal overreach.
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