ST. PAUL, Minn. — Ramsey County and state officials are suing two Somali gangs to try to stop violence at the Minnesota State Fair, alleging they have previously created a public nuisance in and around the Fairgrounds through fights and shootings.

Two civil complaints filed jointly Wednesday in district court by the Ramsey County Attorney’s Office and Minnesota Attorney General’s Office seek temporary injunctive relief barring gangs Muddy and The Ville from “engaging in certain nuisance-causing conduct” within the Fairgrounds and nearby parking lots during the 12-day event and the morning afterward.

When the statute has been previously used, it has “prevented group and gang violence at important community festivals thanks to community and law enforcement coming together and pulling in the same direction to keep the peace,” the Ramsey County Attorney’s Office said in a statement.

The two rival gangs have “targeted the State Fair for its criminal gang activities” in recent years and “intend to target the 2026 State Fair for gang activities in order to gain notoriety and clout,” supporting court filings allege.

The complaints ask a judge to determine whether the gangs have created a public nuisance at the State Fair in the past and to enjoin them from doing so within the Fairgrounds and the “immediate vicinity used by members of the public and State Fair visitors for parking and transit for the event” between 8 a.m. Aug. 27 and 6 a.m. Sept. 8.

The injunctions would bar members of the gangs from associating with each other, including “standing, sitting, walking, driving, bicycling, gathering or appearing, anywhere in public view or any place accessible to the public.”

It is a misdemeanor to violate an injunction.

Ramsey County Attorney John Choi and Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison said the evidence in their cases “is overwhelming as it relates to the concerning level of retaliatory and predatory violence and most specifically the alarming escalation of threats and settling of scores planned to take place at the Minnesota State Fair.”

“We cannot tolerate such a possibility, and it is our responsibility to intervene and prevent it without fear or favor,” they said in a statement. “While these civil lawsuits are an important step to disrupting the alleged plans for violent confrontations, we are working with our community and law enforcement partners to fund and develop more robust violence intervention strategies before and after the Minnesota State Fair.”

The Fair’s No. 1 priority “is to create a safe and secure environment for everyone,” according to a Friday statement from the Fair.

“The Minnesota State Fair has a comprehensive public safety plan developed and implemented in partnership with multiple agencies and experts at local, state and federal levels,” the statement said. “We continue to evaluate and enhance all aspects of our plan, which includes this initiative of the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office.

Ramsey County Chief Judge Sara Grewing will consider the injunctions Thursday during separate hearings.

In 2009, when Choi was St. Paul city attorney, he was the first to use a Minnesota law passed in 2007 that lets cities ask a judge to declare a gang a public nuisance and try to prevent gang activities by restricting where its members go and what they do.

Ramsey County district court judges granted four civil gang injunctions in 2009 to ban alleged gang members from taking part in gang-related activities during the Cinco de Mayo and Rondo Days festival, and again in 2015 for Rondo Days.

The State Fair attracted more than 1.9 million visitors in 2024 and 2025.

“Unfortunately, in recent years, The Ville and a rival gang, Muddy, have used the State Fair to engage in criminal activity and incidents of large-scale group violence with each other,” according to a court memo filed this week in support of the requested injunctions.

The court filing alleges that in 2024 and 2025 members of the gangs brawled within the Fairgrounds, “group violence” that also spilled into the adjacent residential neighborhoods.

Members of the gangs later posted videos of the “brawls” to social media “to mock and antagonize their rivals,” the filing alleges.

According to an affidavit by Ramsey County Sheriff’s Deputy Ben Seidl, a gang investigator, The Ville and Muddy have been driven by their “desire for notoriety, social media attention and desire to retaliate against their rivals for past conflicts and perceived slights.”

“Ville” is short for Burnsville, and the gang also goes by “Burnsville Kids” and “Villains,” while Muddy is associated with Minneapolis, where most of its members live, and is considered the younger generation of the Somali Outlaws street gang, according to the affidavit, which details the following incidents:

On Sept. 2, 2024, the last night of the Fair, three people were shot and wounded in a parking lot about one block from the Fairgrounds by Ville member Abokor Abdiasis Mohamed. Officers found 53 shell casings at the crime scene. Three accomplices were identified as being members of The Ville and other gangs.

“Their objective was to “hunt’ Muddy criminal gang members, as retribution for a 2022 attack on Mr. Mohamed at the Mall of America,” the affidavit says.

Mohamed, 20, of Minneapolis, pleaded guilty to second-degree assault and was sentenced to three years in prison in May.

In June 2025, Muddy members fired shots at members of The Ville outside Burnsville High School’s graduation ceremony after they argued and flashed gang signs at each other as officers attempted to break up several fights, according to the affidavit.

Two months later, the two gangs were involved in multiple fights at the Fair, the affidavit alleges.

This May, a shooting broke out between Muddy and The Ville following the Metropolitan State University graduation in St. Paul after one person “threw disrespectful gang signs to antagonize Ville associates from across the street,” the court filing said. Several people were charged; their cases are ongoing.

According to Seidl, an Instagram account on July 25 referenced “State fair bumps,” which is slang for violent altercations, and listed the two gangs and a few others. It included a poll asking, “Who getting spanked,” which is slang for who will be attacked the worst during the State Fair.

A second post that day from an Instagram account belonging to a known Ville gang member included an image that resembled a poster for a boxing event, with the heading “SOUTH SIDE VS SUBURBS,” with the tagline “THE BIGGEST BATTLE OF THE SUMMER” and the date “August 29th LIVE AT THE MINNESOTA STATE FAIR.”

The 10 people named between the two gangs in the court documents filed this week “have collectively been arrested numerous times for 40 different charges ranging from possession of machine guns, assault with firearms, aggravated robbery and threats of violence,” said Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher.

“They continue to threaten to disrupt the Minnesota State Fair, and the sheriff’s office is taking numerous steps to make sure that doesn’t happen,” Fletcher said, adding that the injunctions are one step. He said he couldn’t get into details of others on Friday.

In July, during Fletcher’s “Live on Patrol,” he said there had been 100-plus shootings and 14 homicides in the Somali community in the Twin Cities in the past two years, and invited parents and leaders to a community meeting.

Somali-American leaders criticized Fletcher’s comments from the livestream, saying they weren’t denying violence or excusing criminal behavior, but that it could be addressed without “stigmatizing an entire community.”

“In a moment where Somali Minnesotans have already faced months of political attacks, hateful rhetoric and the public targeting of our children, how public officials talk about our community matters just as much as what they say,” Yusra Mohamud, founder and CEO of Yuspire, said at a July news conference.

In the livestream, in talking about “the growth of Somali gang crime,” Fletcher said: “It’s just a small number of kids, but they are causing a lot of trouble for the Somali community. We’re not indicting the whole community, just the 1 to 3% that cause the problems. We want the help of the community.”

(Mara H. Gottfried contributed to this report.)

©2026 MediaNews Group, Inc. Visit at twincities.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.