A federal judge on Monday quashed subpoenas that the U.S. Department of Justice issued to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, Attorney General Keith Ellison, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and other local officials, ruling that the subpoenas were politically motivated and lacked any legitimate investigatory purpose.
The decision, from U.S. District Judge Patrick J. Schiltz, represents a rare judicial check on the DOJ’s use of grand-jury subpoenas amid what the judge described as the Trump administration’s efforts to “harass political opponents” over sanctuary policies. The subpoenas were issued in January during a federal immigration enforcement surge in Minnesota. The Guardian reported that federal agents killed two U.S. citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, during the operation.
In the unsealed order, posted publicly by Ellison on Monday, Schiltz wrote that the administration had been “threatening and attempting to punish states and localities that have adopted ‘sanctuary’ policies.” He said initiating an investigation “in order to ‘harass political opponents or to coerce them into taking official action’ – particularly official action that the federal government cannot directly require those political opponents to take – is a blatantly unlawful and unethical use of the grand-jury process.”
“On the one hand, the evidence that the challenged subpoenas were issued for unlawful reasons is overwhelming,” Schiltz wrote. “On the other hand, the Department has struggled – without success – to identify a single plausible investigatory justification for the subpoenas.”
The judge found that the “dominant purpose” of the subpoenas was to “coerce Minnesota officials into assisting the federal government with enforcing civil immigration law and to harass and retaliate against them for failing to do so.”
Ellison said the decision to quash the subpoenas was an “extremely rare step” by the court. Local and state officials had largely resisted the federal enforcement surge, and the DOJ’s investigation into obstruction of federal immigration enforcement had drawn widespread criticism.