On July 20, 2026, U.S. District Judge Eric C. Tostrud, a Trump appointee, dismissed every claim in the Justice Department's lawsuit challenging Minnesota's so-called sanctuary laws. The suit had targeted the state, Minneapolis, St. Paul, and Hennepin County, arguing their limits on cooperation with federal immigration enforcement violated the Supremacy Clause and had to be declared unconstitutional and blocked.
In a 56-page opinion, Tostrud rejected the argument wholesale. He wrote that “the challenged provisions do not single the federal government out for less favorable treatment, at least not in any sense that shows an intergovernmental immunity violation,” and leaned on the Tenth Amendment's anticommandeering doctrine, the principle that the federal government cannot force state and local officials to carry out federal immigration enforcement. The laws, he found, regulate only state and local officials, not the federal government.
The ruling is one more in a lengthening line of losses for the administration's effort to conscript states into its immigration crackdown, and it came from a judge the president himself put on the bench. Minnesota was a center of that crackdown earlier in 2026, with more than 3,000 federal immigration personnel in the state at one point and two U.S. citizens, Alex Pretti and Renee Good, killed by federal agents in Minneapolis in January (see An ICE Officer Kills Renee Good in Minneapolis; Noem Calls It Domestic Terrorism and Trump Falsely Says She Ran Over the Officer and Pam Bondi Letter to Minnesota on Immigration Enforcement).