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For nearly two months, the Trump administration has unleashed immigration officers on the streets of Minneapolis and St. Paul in a siege of increasing cruelty and violence. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers are dragging citizens from their homes, deploying five-year-olds as bait, arresting demonstrators, and using pepper spray on protesters like bug repellent at a barbecue. They have shot three people, including the executions of Renée Good and Alex Pretti.

“The federal government is attempting to bend the state’s will to its own—and that is not allowed under the Constitution.”

The immorality of the moment is clear. But the images of uninhibited brutality visited by federal law enforcement officers onto a metropolis also run counter to our Constitution—both its restrictions on federal power and the freedoms it is meant to protect. Simply put, the violence inflicted by ICE doesn’t just feel wrong: it is a violation of our basic rights, ones that hold the line between democracy on one side and fascism and dictatorship on the other. In Minnesota, we’re plainly seeing why these rights underpin our system of government.

Despite the rampant violations carried out by armed agents of the state, they are unlikely to see much justice in the courts. That’s because in recent decades, the Supreme Court has limited people’s ability to sue individual federal officers who violate their rights. Such suits were accepted and even common in the 19th century. But in sad irony, the same Supreme Court justices who say it’s important to continue the country’s earliest legal traditions have made them all but impossible. “They’ve made it incredibly difficult to sue federal officers for abuse of power, no matter how egregious,” says David Gans, a scholar at the Constitutional Accountability Center, a progressive nonprofit law firm.

But some avenues remain to stopping the violence and obtaining legal relief. Namely, a federal judge can order the government to stop illegal behavior, and there are multiple lawsuits mounting constitutional challenges to both ICE’s tactics and the entire invasion, dubbed Operation Metro Surge, more broadly. As those suits move forward, here is a list of the five amendments the Trump administration has effectively suspended in Minnesota.

The First Amendment

The First Amendment protects the rights to speak freely, to assemble, and to protest. This includes the right to observe federal government action and to protest against it. Crucially for Minnesota, this includes a right that CBP and ICE really don’t like: the right to record their actions. The First Amendment also protects against government retaliation for these acts—these rights would be meaningless if the government could chill them through retaliation. The government cannot target and punish you because of your views or other First Amendment-protected actions.

But under Trump, it’s impossible to count the ways in which all these rights have been violated every day in Minnesota, not to mention around the country. Obstructing law enforcement is not a protected act, but every video of an ICE officer arresting or pepper spraying an observer who is not obstructing them serves as documented evidence of unconstitutional retaliation for a protected act. Every time an officer physically assaults or detains someone who is simply observing or protesting, that’s a violation of the First Amendment. 

This isn’t just theoretical. In a case filed by a group of Twin Cities observers demanding relief from ICE’s tactics, federal Judge Kate Menendez found this month that ICE likely violated the First Amendment rights of two plaintiffs when agents arrested them in what appeared to be retaliation for watching them. Menendez likewise found that a third plaintiff likely suffered unconstitutional retaliation for protected activity when an ICE officer pepper sprayed him as he stood aside a road. Menendez’s opinion provides a glimpse of how ICE is using chemical agents to chill Minnesotans’ free speech: “In one instance, agents drove slowly........

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