A federal judge has quashed six grand-jury subpoenas that were served on some of the state’s top officials as part of an investigation into whether they obstructed immigration enforcement.
The subpoenas were served Jan. 20 on the offices of Gov. Tim Walz, Attorney General Keith Ellison, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, St. Paul Mayor Kaohly Her, and the Hennepin and Ramsey County boards of commissioners.
Those subpoenas came at the height of Operation Metro Surge, a large-scale immigration enforcement effort carried out by the Trump administration in the Twin Cities earlier this year.
The operation faced aggressive opposition from state Democrats as top Trump officials accused them of “encouraging violence against law enforcement.”
Just last week, 15 people were criminally charged for their alleged involvement in conspiracies to impede or injure federal officers during the operation.
Now, U.S. District Court Chief Judge Patrick Schiltz, who was appointed by former President George W. Bush, has granted the local officials’ motion to quash the subpoenas.
“Initiating a criminal 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 the [sic] grand-jury process,” Schiltz wrote in his order.
“The only question, then, is whether the challenged subpoenas were issued for one of these forbidden purposes. The Court has no doubt that they were,” he added.
Walz released a statement calling Schiltz’s ruling a “victory for the rule of law and our democracy.”
“In America, we settle our political differences at the ballot box, and it should disturb every American that Donald Trump is weaponizing the criminal justice system against people he disagrees with,” said Attorney General Ellison.
Some reporters have highlighted Schiltz’s past donations to the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota, which provides free legal services to illegal immigrants.
The organization declared its support for the “ICE Out of Minnesota movement” during Operation Metro Surge and described the Trump administration’s actions as “authoritarian fascism.”
Meanwhile, Liz Kramer, the solicitor general in Ellison’s office, worked on the case to get the subpoenas quashed. She is married to one of Schiltz’s colleagues, Judge Jeffrey Bryan, who declined to recuse himself from a case earlier this year because of his marriage to Kramer.
Anthony Gockowski
Anthony Gockowski is Editor-in-Chief of Alpha News. He previously worked as an editor for The Minnesota Sun and Campus Reform, and wrote for the Daily Caller.
