A federal judge agreed to quash Donald Trump’s Department of Justice subpoenas of Democratic leaders in Minnesota after ruling that they were retaliatory and unlawful.

The Justice Department issued subpoenas to Minnesota Governor  Tim Walz, Attorney General Keith Ellison, Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey, and other local officials in Minneapolis earlier this year after they filed lawsuits to stop Operation Metro Surge, a Trump administration immigration enforcement effort in Minnesota.

The DOJ claimed that officials were obstructing federal agents’ law enforcement efforts in the state. But, U.S. District Judge Patrick Schiltz found that the Justice Department issued the subpoenas to harass and coerce local leaders to co-operate with the federal government’s immigration efforts.

“Initiating a criminal 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,” Schiltz wrote.

“The only question, then, is whether the challenged subpoenas were issued for one of these forbidden purposes,” the judge added. “The Court has no doubt that they were.”

The judge added that the Justice Department “has struggled — without success — to identify a single plausible investigatory justification for the subpoenas.”

In the end, Schiltz granted the motion to quash the subpoenas because he found that the “dominant purpose” 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.”

In a statement, Walz called the ruling “a victory for the rule of law and our democracy.”

“The U.S. Justice Department is pursuing criminal investigations into the President’s political opponents,” he continued. “This case was just one example of that, but we are seeing daily reminders of this administration’s lawlessness – in Minnesota and around the country. We all must continue to seek justice and uphold the rule of law.”

Ellison said, “it should disturb every American that Donald Trump is weaponizing the criminal justice system against people he disagrees with.”

The subpoenas are “a politically motivated retaliation against our city for lawfully standing up to ICE and fighting for our residents,” He said in a statement.

Frey told the Associated Press that the investigation was “never about justice, law, and order, but the absence of it. Subpoenaing political opponents because they spoke on behalf of their constituents violates the core tenets of our democracy and human decency.”