Berry v. Hennepin County

Background

Plaintiffs Patrick Berry, Henrietta Brown, Nadine Little, Dennis Barrow, Virginia Roy, Joel Westvig, Emmett Williams, and Zakat, Aid and Charity Assisting Humanity (ZACAH) filed a putative class action against Hennepin County, the City of Minneapolis, Minneapolis officials, the Minneapolis Park & Recreation Board and its officials, the Hennepin County sheriff, and unnamed police officers. Plaintiffs alleged that defendants conducted sweeps of encampments where people experiencing unsheltered homelessness lived in Minneapolis public parks, seizing and destroying personal property.

The complaint asserted claims under the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments, the Minnesota Constitution, and Minnesota law. Plaintiffs sought a temporary restraining order preventing defendants from clearing public-park encampments and from seizing or destroying property without adequate advance notice. At the hearing, plaintiffs’ counsel described the requested relief as an order barring sweeps that violated Minnesota Governor Tim Walz’s Emergency Executive Order 20-47.

Analysis

A temporary restraining order is an extraordinary form of emergency relief. The court applied the four factors used for this relief: irreparable harm, likelihood of success on the merits, the balance of harms, and the public interest. The court began with irreparable harm because failure to establish that factor independently justified denial of the motion.

As to ZACAH, the court concluded that the organization’s alleged diversion of money and volunteer resources to provide hotel rooms could be compensated through money damages and therefore did not establish irreparable harm. As to plaintiffs Barrow, Berry, Brown, Little, and Roy, the court found that they were not then living in encampments. Their possible future return to an encampment and possible removal therefore involved speculative harm, which was insufficient.

The remaining individual plaintiffs, Westvig and Williams, were living in encampments. They argued that disbandment could leave them without shelter. The court recognized that loss of housing can constitute irreparable harm, but it relied on defendants’ representations and sworn declarations that encampments would not be removed unless health and safety risks to encampment residents and the public existed and adequate shelter was available elsewhere. Defendants also represented that notice and outreach services would be provided. The court found that plaintiffs had not persuasively contradicted this evidence and had not shown that the threatened harm was sufficiently certain and concrete. The court did not decide the remaining temporary-restraining-order factors or the merits of plaintiffs’ constitutional and state-law claims.

Disposition

Judge Wilhelmina M. Wright ordered that plaintiffs’ motion for a temporary restraining order was DENIED without prejudice. Because the motion was denied, the court did not address plaintiffs’ request to waive a security bond.