How a Judge Found ICE Racial Profiling in Minnesota

“Judge rules ICE racial profiling Minnesota” captures the headline, but not the legal problem. In March 2026, Judge Eric Tostrud found that federal immigration officers in Minnesota had made race-based and suspicionless stops of Somali and Latino Minnesotans, and that DHS had adopted an unconstitutional policy authorizing such stops. He then denied the preliminary injunction. The order therefore does two things at once: it credits a record of unconstitutional enforcement conduct, and it refuses the forward-looking remedy the plaintiffs came to court to obtain.[1][2][3]

That is not a contradiction in temperament. It is a familiar federal-courts split between merits proof and remedial authority. The plaintiffs could show what had happened during Operation Metro Surge. The harder question was whether they could show, at the preliminary-injunction stage, a real and immediate threat that it would happen to them again.

The Case Came In As Emergency Relief, Not A Damages Trial

Hussen v. Noem was filed in the District of Minnesota on January 23, 2026, as Case No. 0:26-cv-00291. The ACLU described the suit as a challenge to ICE and CBP practices of suspicionless stops, warrantless arrests, and racial profiling of Minnesotans. The named defendants included DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons, and other DHS officials.[4]

The factual setting was Operation Metro Surge, an immigration-enforcement operation reported to have launched in December 2025 and to have deployed more than 3,000 agents in Minnesota, with Somali and Latino communities among the asserted targets.[5] Those facts matter, but only up to a point. The order was not a general referendum on federal immigration enforcement. It was a Fourth Amendment order on whether particular stops were supported by reasonable suspicion and whether race or ethnicity had become an operative enforcement criterion.

The preliminary-injunction posture sharpened the court’s task. Plaintiffs did not need to prove every possible claim to final judgment. They did need enough record evidence to justify provisional relief. The government, for its part, could have met the declarations with officer testimony, contemporaneous reports, body-camera evidence, or other concrete explanations for why each encounter was lawful. The court’s account, as reported, indicates that it largely did not.

The Order’s Center Of Gravity Was Declarant-By-Declarant Proof

The most important feature of the ruling is methodological. Judge Tostrud did not simply announce that a pattern looked discriminatory. He worked through 33 declarants’ encounters and then drew conclusions from that record. The reported findings were stark: 17 of the 33 declarants were stopped “based solely on their race or ethnicity,” and 23 of the 33 were subjected to investigatory stops without Fourth Amendment reasonable suspicion.[1][2][3]

Those numbers are doing more than rhetorical work. They show a court moving from encounter evidence to systemic inference without treating the class label as proof. The court appears to have asked the question that Fourth Amendment doctrine requires: what did officers know, before or at the moment of seizure, that particularized this person as someone reasonably suspected of an immigration violation?

On that question, the plaintiffs’ declarations mattered because they supplied sequence. A person was present in a workplace, near a vehicle, on a street, or in some other ordinary setting. Officers approached. Questions followed. Movement was restricted, or detention occurred. If the government had a nonracial, individualized basis for suspicion, that basis needed to appear somewhere in the record. The reported order’s force comes from the court’s conclusion that, encounter after encounter, it did not.

This is also where the government’s litigation posture became substantively important. The court reportedly observed that it was “left with almost all of Plaintiff’s declaration testimony undisputed.”[1] In preliminary-injunction practice, an unrebutted declaration does not automatically win the case. But when the government controls much of the operational evidence and gives the court little concrete rebuttal, a judge is not required to imagine lawful reasons that the record does not contain.

That point is easy to understate. The Fourth Amendment does not ask whether immigration enforcement is important in the abstract. It asks whether the seizure at issue was justified. If officers stopped a Somali or Latino Minnesotan and the only discernible reason in the record was perceived ethnicity, the government could not repair the seizure by invoking the general legitimacy of immigration enforcement. General mission does not supply particularized suspicion.

Pretext And Senseless Explanations

The order’s reported language about the government’s explanations is unusually pointed. Judge Tostrud described government justifications for certain stops as “pretextual” and “senseless.”[1][3] Those are not decorative adjectives. They signal that the court was not merely choosing between two equally plausible accounts of ambiguous field conduct. It found explanations that failed to make sense against the facts presented.

For litigators, that distinction matters. A pretext finding can do work that a bare insufficiency finding cannot. If an officer’s stated rationale is implausible, the court may infer that the real rationale lies elsewhere. When similar implausibilities recur across multiple declarants, the inference becomes harder to cabin as an isolated mistake.

The opinion therefore appears to separate three questions that are often blurred in public discussion. First, did a stop occur? Second, did officers have reasonable suspicion apart from race or ethnicity? Third, if race or ethnicity was present in the decision, was it merely one contextual fact or the stop’s actual basis? The reported 17-of-33 and 23-of-33 findings show that the court answered those questions separately, even though they overlapped in the record.[1][2][3]

From Field Encounters To Agency Policy

The next step was the harder one: whether the record showed a DHS policy, not merely a set of unlawful stops by individual officers. The court reportedly found that DHS had “adopted a policy authorizing federal immigration officers to conduct investigatory stops based on ethnicity or race without reasonable suspicion.”[1][2]

That conclusion required more than counting bad stops. Pattern evidence can support an inference, but pattern alone may leave room for the government to argue that the problem is poor training, local deviation, or individual misconduct. Judge Tostrud’s reported reasoning drew on three categories together: the repeated stop evidence, public statements by Secretary Noem and Border Patrol official Gregory Bovino, and a January 2026 Todd Lyons memorandum authorizing warrantless arrests by immigration officers.[1][3]

Each category had a different function. The declarations showed what officers actually did. The public statements helped connect field conduct to leadership messaging. The Lyons memorandum supplied a formal agency document that could be read as authorizing broader warrantless arrest practices. The value was cumulative. Any one piece might be explainable away; together, they allowed the court to treat the challenged conduct as more than happenstance.

There is a useful caution here. A court can infer policy from conduct and statements, but that inference remains record-bound. The reported order does not prove that every immigration stop in Minnesota during the operation was unlawful, or that every officer acted from the same motive. It proves something narrower and more legally useful: on the preliminary-injunction record before Judge Tostrud, plaintiffs showed a likelihood that DHS had adopted an unconstitutional enforcement policy.

Why The Injunction Still Failed

The denial of injunctive relief is not a footnote to the ruling. It is the doctrinal hinge. According to reporting on the order, Judge Tostrud denied an injunction because Operation Metro Surge had drawn down, “dramatically reducing” the chance that plaintiffs would face future harm.[3][6]

That reasoning tracks the familiar problem from City of Los Angeles v. Lyons: past unconstitutional conduct does not, by itself, establish standing for prospective relief. A plaintiff seeking an injunction must show a real and immediate threat of being injured again. The doctrine can be unforgiving in systemic-policing cases because the best evidence of a policy often comes after people have already been stopped, while the remedy they seek depends on proving likely future exposure.

On the reported facts, the drawdown did remedial work that the merits findings could not overcome. Plaintiffs had evidence of what happened when Operation Metro Surge was active at scale. But if the operation had substantially receded by the time of the ruling, the court could conclude that the likelihood of repeat injury was too attenuated for an injunction. Law360’s accessible headline similarly framed the holding as one of no imminent harm from alleged ICE racial stops, though the article itself was not available without a paywall.[6]

Class certification did not cure that problem. The court also denied class certification, and even a certified class would still have needed Article III standing for prospective relief.[3][6] A class mechanism can aggregate claims; it cannot manufacture a live threat of future injury if the named plaintiffs and the proposed class cannot show one.

This is the asymmetry the order exposes. Plaintiffs may build a granular, credible record of unconstitutional conduct, persuade a federal judge that the record reflects an agency policy, and still lose the injunction because the operation’s peak has passed. The doctrine rewards speed, but the evidence necessary to prove a systemic policy often takes time to gather.

The California Shadow: Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo

The unresolved national question is how Tostrud’s fact-specific condemnation fits with the Supreme Court’s September 8, 2025 order in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo. There, the Court stayed an injunction that had restricted federal officers in the Central District of California from considering factors such as race, ethnicity, Spanish language, occupation, and location in immigration stops.[7]

Justice Kavanaugh’s concurrence invoked “common sense” and reasoned that such factors, in combination, could constitute at least reasonable suspicion.[7] Justice Sotomayor’s dissent warned that the ruling “all but declared that all Latinos… are fair game.”[8] The Minnesota order sits inside that tension, but it does not answer it in the abstract.

The distinction is important. Vasquez Perdomo concerned what factors officers may consider under a totality-of-the-circumstances framework. Tostrud’s reported findings concerned a record in which, for many declarants, race or ethnicity was found to be the sole basis for the stop, or reasonable suspicion was absent altogether.[1][2][3] A court can accept that ethnicity, language, occupation, and location may sometimes appear in a lawful totality analysis and still reject stops where those factors collapse into an ethnic dragnet.

That is why the order’s evidentiary method matters more than its most quotable conclusion. If appellate courts review the case, the durable question may not be whether immigration officers can ever consider demographic or location-based factors. It may be whether this record supported the district court’s finding that officers were not applying a lawful totality test at all.

Surrounding Pressure, Carefully Stated

The Minnesota litigation did not develop in isolation. Human Rights Watch later published a June 18, 2026 report, based on more than 130 interviews, describing Minnesota communities as terrorized by federal enforcement activity.[9] The same broader period generated claims of heavy habeas litigation and related disputes over detention and enforcement practices, including reported figures that more than 1,300 habeas petitions were filed in Minnesota from January 2025 through May 2026 and that 88% were successful.[9]

Those materials help describe the litigation environment, but they should not be made to carry more than they can bear. The Hussen order’s legal significance does not depend on treating every surrounding lawsuit or report as proof of the same constitutional violation. Its significance lies in the narrower judicial finding that this preliminary-injunction record showed race-based and suspicionless stops, an agency-policy inference, and no adequate basis for prospective relief.

That narrower framing is also fairer to the declarations. The people who supplied them were not serving as atmosphere. They were the evidentiary mechanism by which lived encounters became record facts. The court’s analysis depended on their ability to describe who stopped them, what was said, what was asked, whether they were free to leave, and what justification—if any—the government later provided.

Litigation Implications

For future plaintiffs, the order points toward a demanding evidentiary model. Declarations need to be specific enough to permit seizure analysis. They need chronology, officer conduct, language used, asserted justifications, and facts negating reasonable suspicion. If the theory is systemic policy, the record also needs connective tissue: repeated patterns, leadership statements, operational directives, training materials, or memoranda that make it plausible to attribute field conduct to the agency rather than to isolated officers.

For government defendants, the ruling is a reminder that broad invocations of enforcement authority are poor substitutes for encounter-specific evidence. If officers had reasonable suspicion, the record must show what it was. If race, ethnicity, language, occupation, or location played a role, the record must explain how those factors operated within a lawful totality rather than as a proxy for removability.

The harder implication concerns timing. Plaintiffs challenging a surge-style operation may need to file quickly enough to preserve a live threat, but they also need enough declarations to prove a pattern. They may need evidence that the challenged practices continue after the public drawdown, that personnel or directives remain in place, or that the same plaintiffs are likely to encounter the same practices again. Without that bridge, the case can produce a serious merits finding and no injunction.

That is the lesson of Hussen beyond the headline. Judge Tostrud’s order shows how a plaintiff can prove an unconstitutional enforcement policy through individualized evidence and cumulative inference. It also shows how Article III can stop the remedy at the courthouse door once the operation that generated the proof has already receded.

References

1. Judge rules ICE made warrantless, race-based stops of Somali, Latino Minnesotans — Courthouse News
2. Federal judge rules ICE agents in Minnesota illegally detained people based on racial profiling — CBS Minnesota
3. Judge finds troubling evidence ICE agents stopped people based on racial, ethnic identity — MPR News
4. ACLU Sues Federal Government to End ICE, CBP's Practice of Suspicionless Stops… — ACLU
5. Operation Metro Surge — Wikipedia
6. Judge Says No Imminent Harm From Alleged ICE Racial Stops — Law360
7. Supreme Court allows federal officers to more freely make immigration stops in LA — SCOTUSblog
8. Whose Common Sense? Some Reflections on Noem v. Vazquez Perdomo — Stanford Law, September 24, 2025
9. A Manufactured Crisis: Minnesota Communities Terrorized by the Federal Government — Human Rights Watch, June 18, 2026