In a significant victory for the Trump Administration, a panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit lifted the injunction of U.S. District Judge Katherin Menendez, who prevented officers from arresting, detaining, pepper-spraying or retaliating against protesters in Minneapolis without probable cause.

In her Jan. 16 decision, Judge Menendez (a Biden appointee and former public defender) ruled in favor of the protesters suing the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and ICE. She found the plaintiffs were likely to succeed on claims that federal agents violated their First and Fourth Amendment rights.

The Eighth Circuit first flagged how Menendez ignored the fact that the record shows a wide range of conduct raising different conditions for law enforcement:

“We accessed and viewed the same videos the district court did. … What they show is observers and protestors engaging in a wide range of conduct, some of it peaceful but much of it not. They also show federal agents responding in various ways. Even the named plaintiffs’ claims involve different conduct, by different officers, at different times, in different places, in response to different behavior. These differences mean that there are no “questions of law or fact common to the class,” Fed. R. Civ. P. 23(a)(2), that would allow the court to decide all their claims in “one stroke.”

The panel also found Judge Menendez’s order unacceptably vague:

“Second, in addition to being too broad, the injunction is too vague.

…Even the provision that singles out the use of “pepper-spray or similar nonlethal munitions and crowd dispersal tools” requires federal agents to predict what the district court would consider “peaceful and unobstructive protest activity.” The videos underscore how difficult it would be for them to decide who has crossed the line: they show a fast-changing mix of peaceful and obstructive conduct, with many protestors getting in officers’ faces and blocking their vehicles as they conduct their activities, only for some of them to then rejoin the crowd and intermix with others who were merely recording and observing the scene.”

The panel found that Judge Menendez’s order left federal authorities in a dangerous position of not knowing when they could use these crowd control measures: “to the extent the injunction’s breadth and vagueness cause federal agents to hesitate in performing their lawful duties, it threatens to irreparably harm the government and undermine the public interest.”

Notably, Judge Menendez is the same judge reviewing an even more sweeping motion for an injunction to enjoin ICE operations, a filing from Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison that I have criticized as constitutionally meritless.

Here is the opinion: Tincher v. Noem