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CNN's Elie Honig pours cold water on blue states' lawsuits over Trump's ICE 'invasion'

CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig told anchor Kate Bolduan that the lawsuits brought against President Donald Trump's ICE crackdowns have no legal standing and are "political diatribes masquerading as lawsuits."

CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig said state legal challenges against President Donald Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) crackdowns lack legal standing and amount to "political diatribes masquerading as lawsuits."

The state of Minnesota, along with the cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, filed lawsuits against the Trump administration over what they described as a "federal invasion" by ICE and other federal deportation forces.

On Tuesday's episode of "CNN News Central," anchor Kate Bolduan asked Honig whether the lawsuits filed against the Trump administration, particularly in Minnesota, were strong.

"No, I don't, Kate," Honig replied. "I’ve read both the Minnesota and Illinois lawsuits. They’re really political diatribes masquerading as lawsuits."

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CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig on the set of "CNN News Central" on Tuesday, Jan. 13, 2025. (Screenshot/CNN)

Similar to Minnesota, the state of Illinois and the city of Chicago also filed lawsuits over Trump’s immigration crackdown. Both lawsuits came Monday, following the fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good by an ICE agent last week.

Honig continued, explaining that the lawsuits seek to "kick ICE out of those states and cities and bar the agency from conducting federal law enforcement in Illinois and Minnesota."

"That’s the top thing both states ask to do, and they cite zero precedent for that. There is zero precedent for that," he said. "There is no way a judge can say, ‘You, federal law enforcement agency, you are not allowed to execute federal law in a certain state or city.’"

Honig said the best outcome the states could hope for would be to get "sympathetic judges" assigned to the cases who put pressure on ICE and "demand questions about how they’re training, how they are carrying out their policy."

"You also could have judges that issue sort of symbolic orders along the lines of, ‘ICE, you are not to violate the law,’ but that’s already the case," he added. "It’s already not allowed for ICE to violate the law."

"So these lawsuits, which appear to be coordinated, they're potentially powerful political statements," Honig said, "but I don’t give them much of a chance of achieving the legal thing that they’re asking for in the courts."

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A demonstrator faces a Border Patrol federal agent at a protest against the fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent, during a rally against increased immigration enforcement across the city outside the Whipple Building in Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S., Jan. 8, 2026. (Tim Evans/Reuters)

Following up, Bolduan asked Honig "what kind of legalese" state officials such as Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison were relying on when they described Trump’s immigration crackdown as a "federal invasion."

"There is no legalese to that," Honig said. "I mean, it’s a powerful sort of rhetorical term. You heard a lot of things about an invasion and how horrible this is. Even if every allegation made in both complaints is true, and we don’t know that, it doesn’t necessarily give them a constitutional legal remedy here."

Furthering his argument, Honig detailed why he believed there was a "constitutional problem" regarding the states' lawsuits.

"And by the way, to be specific about why there’s a constitutional problem here. If a judge were to say to ICE, 'You can’t enforce the law in Minnesota or Illinois,' it would violate the supremacy clause, which says the federal government gets to carry out federal priorities and the states cannot stop them," he said.

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Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison speaks at a Community Empowerment speaker series at the Bridge Center on May 7, 2025, in Detroit, Michigan. (Monica Morgan/Getty Images)

Minnesota’s lawsuit names Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem, top officials with DHS, ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) — including Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons and Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino — along with the federal agencies themselves.

"We’re here to announce a lawsuit we're filing against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to end the unlawful, unprecedented surge of the federal law enforcement agents into Minnesota," Ellison said during a news conference Monday. "We allege that the obvious targeting of Minnesota for our diversity, for our democracy and our differences of opinion with the federal government is a violation of the Constitution and of federal law."

Ellison said the deployment of thousands of armed and masked DHS agents had caused "serious harm" to Minnesota and urged an end to what he called a "federal invasion" of the Twin Cities.

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Fox News' Greg Wehner contributed to this report.

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