The American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota said Tuesday that the county is surreptitiously trying to shut down the occupation of protesters at the Hennepin County Government Center plaza by issuing a rash of trespass notices in the last several days.

Chuck Samuelson, the state ACLU executive director, said ACLU attorneys will appear before U.S. District Judge Richard Kyle on Wednesday at 1 p.m. to seek an immediate temporary restraining order to halt the issuing of trespass notices.

Samuelson said that he knows of at least nine such trespass notices that have been issued by the Hennepin County security staff in the last several days. If the protesters return to the plaza within 90 days, they will be arrested, he said.

Hennepin County Administrator Richard Johnson denied Tuesday that the county was using the trespass notices to shut down the OccupyMN protest.

"We have issued a number of trespass notices but it is based on the actions of the individuals. It has nothing to do with the lawsuit," Johnson said.

He said that since Oct. 7 when the protests on the plaza began, the county security staff has issued 24 trespass notices. Since Nov. 19, the county has issued nine trespass notices he said. "One of those involved six trespass notices in a physcal altercation between three intoxicated males we think were coming from the Vikings game and three demonstrators. Of the remaining three, two were for indecent conduct and the other was for repeated warnings of smoking on the property."

Samuelson said that one of the four plaintiffs in the lawsuit has been issued a trespass notice in the last several days for writing on the plaza in chalk, but Johnson said he did not think that that happened. Samuelson said he is wrong. Samuelson said that the person who was trespassed for smoking said he had never before been accosted by security for smoking.

Smoking on the plaza and using chalk on the plaza are rule violations. If the protesters were subsequently arrested, it would not be for writing with chalk or smoking but for returning to the plaza, thus violating the trespass notice.

The ACLU filed suit on Monday to prevent the county from evicting the protesters, but the suit was drafted before the ACLU became aware that the trespass notices were being used in a widespread way, said Samuelson.

Samuelson alleged that the county was taking the trespass approach to avoid the "unpleasantness" around the kind of physical confrontations that have garnered unfavorable publicity for local law enforcement units across the country. Those have included the forcible eviction of protesters from a New York City park and the pepper spraying of student protests at the University of California at Davis.

"It is a quiet way to make these guys go away, to just disappear," Samuelson said.