Photo Credit: Richard Tsong-Taatarii, Federal agents pin down a man and spray a chemical irritant in his face as protesters clash with ICE Agents in Minneapolis, The Minnesota Star Tribune (Jan. 21, 2026), https://aperture.org/editorial/inside-a-minneapolis-newspapers-coverage-of-the-ice-raids/.
Authored by: Lyndsey Stott
On January 16, 2026, a federal district judge in Minnesota ordered federal immigration agents to stop retaliating against people for peacefully watching them work.[1] On January 26, the Eighth Circuit stayed the order, and the constitutional claims of six Minnesota residents who had been grabbed, pinned to the ground, and arrested for the act of observing law enforcement were left without a remedy, at least for now.[2]
The legal reason the Eighth Circuit intervened was not because the First and Fourth Amendment claims lacked merit, but because of a newly unsettled question about who courts are permitted to protect. Tincher v. Noem sits at the intersection of two Supreme Court decisions issued just one month apart last year that may not be reconcilable. How courts resolve that conflict will determine whether district judges have any meaningful tools left to protect people from constitutional violations that are occurring faster than the procedural timeline of federal litigation can move.
I. Operation Metro Surge and the Plaintiffs
In early December 2025, the Department of Homeland Security launched Operation Metro Surge in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul metropolitan area. DHS described it as the largest immigration enforcement operation it had ever conducted.[3]At its peak, approximately 3,000 federal agents were operating across the Twin Cities. The operation generated immediate controversy, both for its scale and for the conduct of some of the agents involved.[4]
The six named plaintiffs who filed suit on December 17, 2025 were not immigration violators. They were American residents who had engaged in a constitutionally protected activity, observing federal agents at work in their neighborhoods, and alleged they were physically seized and arrested for doing so.
A. The Arrest of Susan Tincher
Plaintiff Susan Tincher, a longtime resident of Minneapolis, drove to an ICE operation on the morning of December 9, 2025 after receiving neighborhood alerts.[5] She parked, walked to the sidewalk, and stood approximately six feet from the agents with her hands down and what witnesses described as neutral body language. She asked agents if they were ICE, and, within approximately fifteen seconds, multiple agents grabbed her, pulled her to the ground face-first into the snow, and handcuffed her. She was transported to the Whipple Federal Building, where agents removed her clothes, cut off her wedding ring, and shackled her before holding her for more than five hours without reading her her rights. She was eventually charged with obstructing a federal officer and released.[6]
The government’s account, offered through the declaration of Acting Field Office Director David Easterwood, was that Tincher had refused repeated commands to step back, verbally stated her intent to cross into the agents’ perimeter, attempted to push a female officer out of the way, and actively resisted handcuffing.[7] The district court noted a critical problem with that account: following oral argument, the government was unable to produce a single frame of video footage of the incident, despite the fact that the Easterwood declaration was based on an incident report prepared after the fact. The court found that what video did exist did not show Tincher resisting as agents escorted her to the vehicle.[8]
B. The Arrest of Abdikadir Noor
Plaintiff Abdikadir Noor, a 43-year-old Somali American and U.S. citizen from Fridley, Minnesota, was arrested on December 15, 2025 after attempting to de-escalate a confrontation between ICE agents and a crowd that had gathered around a traffic stop.[9] Video evidence in the record showed Noor holding his arms outstretched to keep protesters back from the officers, pushing demonstrators away from agents, and appearing to instruct people in the crowd to remain peaceful. He was standing approximately ten to fifteen feet from the nearest agent when, according to the video, an agent stepped out of a vehicle, said “Let’s get him. Right here,” walked up to Noor, and threw him to the ground.[10]
At the Whipple building, agents allegedly made remarks including “they all come here fraudulently,” “Somalis drained Minnesota,” and “Somalis should go back home” while examining Noor’s passport.[11] He was shackled, placed in a cell, and not charged with any offense. The sealed government incident report submitted after the hearing did not identify any specific conduct by Noor forming the basis of his arrest. The district court found that “at no time during his arrest [did] Noor appear to resist the officers.”[12]
C. The Broader Evidentiary Record
The record before the district court was unusually extensive for a preliminary injunction proceeding. By oral argument on January 13, 2026, the plaintiffs had submitted thirty-three declarations from the named plaintiffs, attorneys, journalists, clergy, and other community members, and ten videos of specific incidents.[13]
Post-argument FOIA data would later confirm what the individual incident records suggested, that of at least 3,700 arrests made during Operation Metro Surge, fewer than one quarter of those arrested had any criminal conviction, and approximately 35% of cases were collateral arrests from street sweeps rather than targeted enforcement action.[14]
II. The Preliminary Injunction: What Judge Menendez Ordered
District Judge Katherine M. Menendez, a 2021 Biden appointee who spent nearly two decades as a federal public defender before becoming a magistrate judge and then a district judge,[15] granted the preliminary injunction in part on January 16, 2026, nine days after ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed legal observer Renee Nicole Good in a Minneapolis residential neighborhood.[16]
Preliminary injunctions in the Eighth Circuit are governed by the four-factor Dataphase test: (1) likelihood of success on the merits; (2) irreparable harm without relief; (3) balance of the equities; and (4) the public interest.[17]
On likelihood of success, Judge Menendez found that the plaintiffs had made a strong showing on their First Amendment retaliation claims. The video record of the Noor arrest, in which an agent singled Noor out after Noor had been actively trying to keep the crowd away from officers, was difficult for the government to explain as anything other than retaliation for his presence and protected activity.[18] On Tincher, the complete absence of government video despite the Easterwood declaration’s specificity undermined the credibility of the government’s version.[19]
On irreparable harm, the court applied the established principle that First Amendment violations are presumptively irreparable because their chilling effect on protected speech and observation cannot be fully compensated after the fact.[20] On the merged equities and public interest inquiry, the court found that prohibiting retaliation against bystanders did not meaningfully impair the government’s ability to conduct its enforcement operations as the injunction said nothing about who could be arrested for immigration violations.[21]
After rejecting and limiting both of the Plaintiffs’ versions of the injunction sought, the court’s final operative terms prohibited covered federal agents operating in Minnesota from:
a. Retaliating against persons who are engaging in peaceful and unobstructive protest activity, including observing the activities of Operation Metro Surge.
b. Arresting or detaining persons who are engaging in peaceful and unobstructive protest activity, including observing the activities of Operation Metro Surge, in retaliation for their protected conduct and absent a showing of probable cause or reasonable suspicion that the person has committed a crime or is obstructing or interfering with the activities of Covered Federal Officers.
c. Using pepper-spray or similar nonlethal munitions and crowd dispersal tools against persons who are engaging in peaceful and unobstructive protest activity, including observing the activities of Operation Metro Surge, in retaliation for their protected conduct.
d. Stopping or detaining drivers and passengers in vehicles where there is no reasonable articulable suspicion that they are forcibly obstructing or interfering with Covered Federal Agents, or otherwise violating 18 U.S.C. § 111. The act of safely following Covered Federal Agents at an appropriate distance does not, by itself, create reasonable suspicion to justify a vehicle stop.[22]
Critically, the injunction did not protect only the six named plaintiffs. It extended to the entire uncertified putative class defined as “[a]ll persons who do or will in the future record, observe, and/or protest against Operation Metro Surge and related operations that have been ongoing in this District since December 4, 2025.”[23] That definitional choice became the injunction’s fatal flaw.
III. The Eighth Circuit Stay: Two Problems with the Injunction
The government filed its notice of appeal on January 19 and simultaneously moved for an emergency stay.[24] On January 26, a 2-3 majority of the Eighth Circuit panel, Judges Bobby Shepherd and David Stras, appointed by President George W. Bush and President Donald Trump, respectively, stayed the injunction in full pending appeal.[25] Judge Raymond Gruender, a 2004 Bush appointee, concurred in part and dissented in part.
A. The Breadth Problem: Universal Injunction by Another Name
The majority’s primary holding turned on Trump v. CASA, where the Supreme Court held 6-3 that federal courts lack statutory authority under the Judiciary Act of 1789 to issue universal injunctions, orders that prohibit the government from acting against anyone, not just the parties before the court.[26] As Justice Barrett wrote for the majority, the key distinction is not where an injunction applies geographically, but whom it protects: a universal injunction “prohibits the Government from enforcing the law against anyone, anywhere.”[27]
The Tincher majority concluded that extending relief to the uncertified putative class was precisely this: an order prohibiting the government from retaliating against anyone who might go out to watch Operation Metro Surge, regardless of any connection to the lawsuit.[28] The class had never been certified under Rule 23, its members had never been identified, the incidents underlying the six named plaintiffs’ claims involved different officers, different locations, different circumstances, and different conduct, so there were no common questions of law or fact that could be resolved “in one stroke” as Rule 23 requires.[29]
The plaintiffs’ strongest counter-argument was A.A.R.P. v. Trump, decided one month before CASA, in which the Supreme Court explicitly held that courts “need not decide whether a [putative] class should be certified” before granting class-wide preliminary relief.[30] The majority acknowledged A.A.R.P., but distinguished it, holding that even if courts may sometimes skip certification, the putative class here had no realistic path to certification given the individualized nature of each plaintiff’s claims. On that reasoning, A.A.R.P. did not save the injunction, and CASA required it to be stayed.[31]
B. The Vagueness Problem: Obey-the-Law Injunctions Under Rule 65(d)
The majority’s second independent ground was that the injunction’s core prohibitions failed Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 65(d)(1), which requires an injunction to “state its terms specifically” and “describe in reasonable detail the act or acts restrained or required.”[32] The Eighth Circuit has long held that injunctions amounting to commands to simply “obey the law” do not satisfy this standard because they give defendants no meaningful notice beyond what the Constitution already requires.[33]
The majority found the injunction’s two central prohibitions against retaliating against persons “engaging in peaceful and unobstructive protest activity” and against vehicle stops lacking “reasonable articulable suspicion” were precisely such obey-the-law commands.[34] They restated First and Fourth Amendment doctrine without adding any operative content. The majority leaned on the practical reality of large-scale protest policing: the videos in the record showed rapidly shifting conditions where peaceful and obstructive conduct intermixed, making it impossible for agents to know in real time whether a given action would expose them to contempt.[35] As the court noted, “a wrong call could end in contempt, yet there is little in the order that constrains the district court’s power to impose it.”[36]
IV. The Dissent’s Rejoinder: The Unresolved A.A.R.P./CASA Tension
Judge Gruender’s partial dissent goes to the heart of why Tincher matters beyond its immediate facts. He disagreed with the majority on both grounds in ways that reveal a genuine doctrinal fault line, a conflict in recent Supreme Court precedent that no court has yet resolved.
On the breadth question, Gruender would not have granted the stay. His reading of A.A.R.P. was that the Supreme Court had explicitly blessed class-wide preliminary relief for uncertified putative classes, and he declined to read CASA as having silently abrogated that instruction.[37] He acknowledged the tension between the two decisions but concluded that an emergency stay motion was not the appropriate vehicle for resolving a genuine ambiguity in freshly decided Supreme Court precedent.[38]
On the vagueness question, Gruender agreed with the majority that most of the injunction was too broadly worded but drew a firm line at the pepper-spray prohibition. An order telling trained federal agents not to use chemical irritants on individuals who posed no imminent threat was, in his view, concrete enough to satisfy Rule 65(d).[39] He pointed out that the government had not demonstrated that its agents could not understand what the order required.[40] This was not, in Gruender’s reading, a situation calling for contempt anxiety, but a situation calling for basic compliance with a specific directive.
V. Why It Matters: The Doctrinal Gap After CASA
The practical stakes of the Tincher stay are significant. After CASA, a district court facing a fast-moving civil rights challenge to ongoing government conduct is caught in a structural dilemma. It can protect the named plaintiffs before it, but an injunction covering only six people does nothing for the next observer who goes out to document an ICE operation and is thrown to the ground. Or it can attempt to certify a class, but class certification requires briefing, a hearing, and Rule 23 findings that cannot realistically be made on an emergency timeline when the alleged harm is occurring in real time.
This is not a hypothetical tension. Operation Metro Surge involved up to 3,000 federal agents conducting daily operations across a major metropolitan area. The affected population was large, diffuse, and unknowable in advance. Requiring each of them to file individual suits and obtain individual injunctions before their First Amendment rights were protected would make meaningful interim relief functionally impossible.
This is the gap CASA created and A.A.R.P. arguably addressed. There are circumstances where constitutional violations occur at scale against a group of people who share a legal interest but have not yet organized into a certified class. The Tincher majority’s answer, that such relief is a universal injunction and is therefore prohibited, forecloses the intermediate remedy of putative-class preliminary relief. Whether that result is constitutionally sound is a question the federal courts have not yet fully answered.
The question Tincher raises is whether the post-CASA remedial framework is equipped to address such conduct when it occurs at the scale and pace of a 3,000-agent operation.
Conclusion
What Tincher v. Noem exposes is a fault line in the post-CASA remedial landscape. The Supreme Court curtailed universal injunctions to preserve separation of powers and limit judicial supervision of the executive branch, but in doing so, it left unresolved whether courts can protect uncertified putative classes from ongoing government misconduct through preliminary relief, a question A.A.R.P. appeared to answer affirmatively just weeks before CASA cut against it. The Tincher merits appeal, pending before the Eighth Circuit on an expedited briefing schedule,[41] will not resolve the Supreme Court tension. But it may force the circuit to confront what, if anything, remains of A.A.R.P. after CASA and whether federal courts have any meaningful tools left to protect people when constitutional violations are occurring faster than a class can be certified.
[1] Tincher v. Noem, No. 0:25-cv-4669 (KMM/DTS), 2026 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 9436, at *102 (D. Minn. Jan. 16, 2026).
[2] Tincher et al. v. Noem et al., No. 0:25-cv-04669 (D. Minn., filed Dec. 17, 2025).
[3] Joshua Barajas, Shooting Deaths Climb in Trump’s Mass Deportation Effort, PBS (Jan. 29, 2026), https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/a-look-at-shootings-by-federal-immigration-officers.
[4] Rebecca Santana & Mike Balsamo, Homeland Security Plans 2,000 Officers in Minnesota for Its ‘Largest Immigration Operation Ever,’ AP (last updated Jan. 6, 2026), https://apnews.com/article/immigration-enforcement-ice-noem-minnesota-somali-db661df6de1131a034da2bda4bb3d817.
[5] Tincher et al. v. Noem et al., No. 0:25-cv-04669, Order at 4-6 (D. Minn. Jan. 16, 2026) [hereinafter “Menendez Order”] (detailing arrest of plaintiff Susan Tincher on December 9, 2025).
[6] Id.
[7] Id. at 7-8.
[8] Id.
[9] Id. at 8-14 (detailing arrest of plaintiff Abdikadir Noor on December 15, 2025).
[10] Id. at 11-13 (describing video record of Noor arrest).
[11] Id.
[12] Id. at 13 (“At no time during his arrest does Noor appear to resist the officers.”).
[13] Menendez Order, supra note 5, at 1-2.
[14] Madison McVan & Alyssa Chen, More Than 3,700 Immigrants Arrested During Operation Metro Surge, Per New Data (Mar. 31, 2026), https://minnesotareformer.com/2026/03/31/3700-immigrants-arrested-during-operation-metro-surge/; Jon Collins & Kate Martin, ICE Arrests in Minnesota: Three-Quarters of Arrestees Had No Criminal Record, Data Shows (Mar. 31, 2026), https://www.mprnews.org/story/2026/03/31/ice-arrests-in-minnesota-three-quarters-of-arrestees-had-no-criminal-record-data-shows; Meghnad Bose & Luke Lawson, Two-Thirds of People Arrested by ICE in Minnesota Surge Had No Criminal Records, New Data Reveals (Mar. 30, 2026), https://theintercept.com/2026/03/30/ice-minnesota-criminal-records-data-arrests/.
[15] Federal Judicial Center, Menendez, Katherine Marie (last visited Apr. 13, 2026), https://www.fjc.gov/history/judges/menendez-katherine-marie.
[16] Melissa Petruzzello, 2025-26 Minnesota ICE Deployment (last updated Feb. 12, 2026), https://www.britannica.com/event/2025-26-Minnesota-ICE-Deployment.
[17] Dataphase Sys., Inc. v. C.L. Sys., Inc., 640 F.2d 109, 114 (8th Cir. 1981) (en banc).
[18] Menendez Order, supra note 5, at 35-44.
[19] Id. at 44-52.
[20] Id. at 52-60 (“The Court finds that a variety of Defendants’ conduct would chill a person of ordinary firmness from engaging in further protected activity.”).
[21] Id. at 60-70.
[22] Id. at 81.
[23] Id. at 77.
[24] Tincher et al. v. Noem et al., No. 26-1105, slip op. at 2 (8th Cir. Jan. 26, 2026) [hereinafter “8th Cir. Stay Op.”] (per curiam) (Gruender, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part).
[25] Federal Judicial Center, Shepherd, Bobby E., https://www.fjc.gov/history/judges/shepherd-bobby-e (last visited Apr. 13, 2026); Federal Judicial Center, Stras, David Ryan, https://www.fjc.gov/history/judges/stras-david-ryan (last visited Apr. 13, 2026).
[26] Trump v. CASA, Inc., 606 U.S. 831, 862 (2025).
[27] Id. at 837 n.1 (citing H. Wasserman, “Nationwide” Injunctions Are Really “Universal” Injunctions and They Are Never Appropriate, 22 Lewis & Clark L. Rev. 335, 338 (2018)).
[28] Id. at 856.
[29] See Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Dukes, 564 U.S. 338, 389-90 (2011) (“Their claims must depend upon a common contention –for example, the assertion of discriminatory bias on the part of the same supervisor. That common contention, moreover, must be of such a nature that it is capable of classwide resolution–which means that determination of its truth or falsity will resolve an issue that is central to the validity of each one of the claims in one stroke.”); see also Tincher v. Noem, No. 26-1105, slip op. at 2 (8th Cir. Jan. 26, 2026) (citing Dukes, 564 U.S. 338, in holding that the individualized nature of plaintiffs’ claims foreclosed class certification).
[30] 8th Cir. Stay Op., supra note 24, at 5.
[31] Id. at 3 (citing A.A.R.P., 605 U.S. at 98).
[32] Fed. R. Civ. P. 65(d)(1)(B)–(C).
[33] 8th Cir. Stay Op., supra note 24, at 3-4.
[34] Id.
[35] Id. at 4.
[36] Id.
[37] Id. at 5-6 (Gruender, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part).
[38] Id.
[39] Id.
[40] Id. at 6.
[41] Susan Tincher v. Kristi Noem, No. 26-1105 (8th Cir.), CourtListener Docket (briefing schedule set with appendix due Mar. 11, 2026).