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Dozens of immigrants living in Minneapolis with refugee status have been arrested in recent days and sent to detention centers in Texas, legal representatives warn.
According to the Advocates for Human Rights, a legal group in Minneapolis, at least 100 individuals have been detained since the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services launched Operation PARRIS in Minnesota last week. In an announcement, DHS described the operation as “a sweeping initiative reexamining thousands of refugee cases through new background checks and intensive verification of refugee claims.”
The department claims that around 5,600 refugees from Minnesota who have not obtained green cards are the target of the operation. Lindsey Greising, a policy-focused attorney for the advocacy group, told the Observer that individuals of all ages and genders have been targeted in the arrests.
“People are being moved very, very quickly,” said Greisling. “We have a handful of individuals who are 16-year-old girls who were arrested and brought to a detention center in Minnesota under this new policy. And then they were threatened that they needed to have their parents come there, [ICE was] using the threat of sending them to Texas to get their parents to come [to the ICE offices].”
The advocacy center believes its clients have been sent to detention centers in El Paso and Dilley, Texas, which is about an hour southwest of San Antonio. ICE and the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a list of questions by the Observer. The department that launched the operation, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, described itself as the “wrong agency” to answer questions about the arrests.
According to The New York Times, a majority of detainees under Operation PARRIS so far have been from Somalia, a population that President Donald Trump has targeted in recent weeks amid reports of fraud. On Tuesday, the Department of Homeland Security announced that it will end Temporary Protective Status for Somalis in March, forcing around 2,400 people out of the U.S.
But Greisling emphasized that those being arrested now are refugees, not individuals with Temporary Protective Status, and they are in the U.S. legally under their humanitarian claims. It is “unprecedented” to see such sweeping attacks on a group that legal advocates challenge the government’s right to target, she said. It is not clear if deportation orders will be issued for those who have been arrested, but if they are, it could be devastating for those individuals.
Refugees are a population that the U.S. government recognizes as having entered the country in a manner that is considered legal. According to the United States’ own definition, refugee status is granted when it has been determined by an officer that an individual has suffered “persecution or [has] a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion.”
Refugees are required to obtain a green card within a year of arriving in the U.S. However, some advocates have challenged the requirement as grounds for the Minneapolis crackdown, arguing that it sometimes falls through the cracks for financial or political reasons and has never led to widespread arrests.
Reporting by the Times and The Washington Post suggests that refugees from Mali, Venezuela, Myanmar and Eritrea have also been targeted in the arrests. Both of the reports indicate that at least some of those detained by ICE had applied for their green cards. In December, Trump ordered a pause on issuing green cards to refugees and called for the reevaluation of all refugees who had entered the U.S. since 2021 from a handful of countries, including Somalia, Venezuela and Eritrea, regardless of their green card status.
Greisling said it is unclear why the detainees are being moved to Texas. Although the state has “a very large infrastructure” for processing and housing detainees, the system is also “overwhelmed” as Texas has been an epicenter of Trump’s immigration crackdown. As refugees are moved across jurisdictions, though, it does make legal representation and advocacy “as confusing and chaotic as possible.”
“The people that we’ve been screening and assisting with, we’ve had a matter of hours to be able to screen their case and get a basic understanding of what’s going on,” Greisling said. “It’s requiring a really rapid response.”
