ACLU of Minnesota Releases 2026 Legislative Session Report

This year’s legislative planning and legislative session were upended by federal agents’ violent occupation of Minnesota. The ACLU-MN responded to the onslaught by training thousands of observers, opening a portal to report constitutional violations, and litigating against the federal government’s First Amendment retaliation and race-based stops.

Operation Metro Surge emphasized the need for an integrated policy approach – one that combined the ACLU-MN’s work on immigration, surveillance, policing, and carceral reform – to push back against the federal government’s attacks on our constitutional system.

Currently, the government is collecting massive amounts of data on Americans, including from private data brokers. Its agents are using that data to threaten people, follow them to their homes, detain them for exercising their constitutional rights, and racially profile and detain Americans without access to counsel, spiritual guidance, or adequate medical care solely because of immigration status or their willingness to defend their immigrant neighbors.

The ACLU-MN brought forth a robust policy package this session to address these harms. Minnesota became the first legislative body to pass a prohibition on geofence and geolocation warrants, and we were one vote short of instituting broad immigration protections. These protections would have included a statutory right to education regardless of immigration status, a ban on immigration enforcement in sensitive locations, a civil remedy for constitutional violations by state actors, and a ban on masked, unidentified police officers.

The ACLU-MN will bring these policies and more into the 2027 legislative session, and we expect to win.