Two Ojibwe women won a temporary restraining order Friday against a Minnesota sheriff after his department allegedly barricaded the driveway of a private camp where Enbridge pipeline protesters were gathered as guests.
The order prevents the Hubbard County sheriff’s office from blocking access to and from the property, which is owned by the nonprofit Switchboard Trainers Network, and houses an indigenous collective led by Ojibwe attorney and climate activist Tara Houska. According to the decision, the sheriff’s department is also prohibited from stopping people traveling in and out of the camp, issuing them citations or threatening them with arrest.
The order came just a week after Switchboard, Houska and Ojibwe activist Winona LaDuke filed suit against the sheriff’s office, alleging that squad cars descended on the property in June, blocked the driveway and arrested several residents and guests over the course of three days. Earlier this week, Sheriff Corwin Aukes told Law360 that 150 feet of the driveway technically belongs to the county. LaDuke had acquired an easement, but the rights didn’t transfer when she deeded the property to Switchboard, he reasoned.
“The evidence before the court does not support defendants’ interpretation of the easement or law enforcement actions to blockade and criminalize the use of the driveway in existence for 90 years,” Assistant Chief Judge Jana M. Austad found Friday. The court found that the right of way, which LaDuke had paid for, was not nullified when she transferred the property title.
“Even considering the arguments made on behalf of defendants at the hearing, there is no basis for finding that defendants would be likely to succeed on the merits,” Judge Austad wrote. In particular, she found the argument that police are only preventing use of the easement when people are trying
to enter the property, and not when they exit, “is suggestive that the Sheriff’s actions are directed toward a law enforcement goal, rather than seeking to address property rights,” she wrote.
The women have “strong public policy considerations on their side,” the judge said, since they allege the sheriff’s department is “interfering with fundamental rights including, but not limited to, the right to peaceably assemble, the right to be free of unreasonable seizures [and] the right not to have property rights taken without just compensation.”
“Defendants seem to assert the restrictions on the ability of plaintiffs and guests to use the property is a police action justified by issues related to Line 3 protests. If that is accurate, there is lawful means of police action by warrant,” the order said.
According to attorney Mara Verheyden-Hilliard of the Center for Protest Law and Litigation, who represents the women, the incident followed “months” of police seizures, harassment and surveillance of Native activists by the Hubbard County sheriff’s department. She said the department is reimbursed by the Canadian oil company from a pipeline security fund.
Similar scenes have been playing out elsewhere since the Enbridge Line 3 project broke ground early this year, she told Law360. “What we’re seeing in Hubbard County is in many ways similar to what we’re seeing in counties all over northern Minnesota, where the sheriff’s departments and their deputies are acting in total disregard of their constitutional and legal obligations, and acting in service to the Enbridge pipeline company against the environmental protectors who oppose thepipeline. We intend to fight for the land defenders and the water protectors to stop the illegal law enforcement activities,” Verheyden-Hilliard said.
LaDuke and Houska will seek a permanent injunction against the Hubbard County sheriff’s department, and the Center for Protest Law is mounting a federal complaint challenging the Enbridge law enforcement fund as an anti-democratic incentive for on-duty police officers to go after the corporation’s political opponents.
Houska, LaDuke and Switchboard are represented by Jason Steck of the Law Office of Jason Steck and Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, Carl Messineo and Amanda Eubanks of the Center for Protest Law and Litigation’s Partnership for Civil Justice Fund.
Defendants are represented by Assistant Hubbard County Attorney Anna Emmerling.
The case is Houska et al v. Hubbard County et al., case number unavailable, in Hubbard County District Court.
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