A federal judge agreed to quash the US federal government’s subpoenas of leaders in Minnesota issued during the Trump administration’s controversial immigration crackdown on the state earlier this year.

The US Department of Justice issued subpoenas to the Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, the attorney general, Keith Ellison, the Minneapolis mayor, Jacob Frey, and other local officials in the Twin Cities in January.

The department said it was investigating the officials for obstructing federal immigration enforcement. Local and state officials largely did not support the federal enforcement surge, during which federal agents killed two US citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, in the streets.

The US district court for Minnesota unsealed an order from Chief Judge Patrick J Schiltz on Monday that showed the subpoenas were rejected as politically motivated. Ellison posted the unsealed order on Monday, saying the decision to quash the subpoenas was an “extremely rare step” by the court.

In the order, Schiltz wrote that the Trump administration had been “threatening and attempting to punish states and localities that have adopted ‘sanctuary’ policies”. He noted that initiating an investigation “in order to ‘harass political opponents or to coerce them into taking official action – particularly official action that the federal government cannot directly require those political opponents to take – is a blatantly unlawful and unethical use the grand-jury process”.

“On the one hand, the evidence that the challenged subpoenas were issued for unlawful reasons is overwhelming,” he wrote. “On the other hand, the Department has struggled – without success – to identify a single plausible investigatory justification for the subpoenas.”

He concluded that the court found the “dominant purpose” of the subpoenas was to “coerce Minnesota officials into assisting the federal government with enforcing civil immigration law and to harass and retaliate against them for failing to do so” and thus the court granted the motion to quash the subpoenas.

More details soon …