A federal judge in Minnesota has blocked immigration officers from arresting and detaining recently resettled refugees in the state after a lawsuit accused agents of “hunting” them down and sending them to a detention center in Texas.
The order from Minnesota District Judge John Tunheim also commands the administration to immediately release any detained refugees and return them to their homes in Minnesota.
In his ruling on Wednesday night, Tunheim notes that the lawsuit involves refugees who have been “carefully and thoroughly vetted” before they were accepted into the United States, because of persecution in the countries from which they have come.”
“They are not committing crimes on our streets, nor did they illegally cross the border,” he added.
“Refugees have a legal right to be in the United States, a right to work, a right to live peacefully — and importantly, a right not to be subjected to the terror of being arrested and detained without warrants or cause in their homes or on their way to religious services or to buy groceries,” Tunheim wrote. “At its best, America serves as a haven of individual liberties in a world too often full of tyranny and cruelty. We abandon that ideal when we subject our neighbors to fear and chaos.”
The order remains in effect while the judge considers a wider injunction.
“For more than two weeks, refugees in Minnesota have been living in terror of being hunted down and disappeared to Texas,” said Kimberly Grano, staff attorney at the International Refugee Assistance Project, which joined the litigation. “This temporary restraining order will immediately put in place desperately needed guardrails on ICE and protect resettled refugees from being unlawfully targeted for arrest and detention.”
President Donald Trump’s administration launched Operation PARRIS earlier this month to exclusively target the state’s 5,600 new refugees, who are legally present in the country but are not yet lawful permanent residents.
But Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers have arrested them at immigration check-ins, on their way to work or school, and appeared at their doorstep without a warrant for their arrest, according to a recent class-action lawsuit. Others were shackled and sent to a detention center in Texas, more than 1,200 miles away.
The plaintiffs in the case were admitted to the country through the Refugee Admissions Program “after undergoing painstaking vetting processes and waiting years for safe resettlement,” according to the lawsuit.
They aren’t subject to any deportation orders and are not considered a flight risk, “yet they have been detained or are at imminent risk of detention” because Homeland Security officials “arbitrarily determined, without any rational basis or legal authority, to intimidate and terrorize the refugees of Minnesota” because they were admitted under President Joe Biden’s administration, lawyers wrote.
Lawyers for targeted refugees argued that the operation is fueled by the president’s “animus” towards Somali immigrants he has derided as “garbage” who “come from hell.”
Trump has spent months demonizing the state’s Somali population, including Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar, who was assaulted during a town hall hours after Trump singled her out during a campaign-style event.
The Twin Cities are home to roughly 80,000 people of Somali ancestry, the vast majority of whom are legal residents or American citizens. But the president — seizing on a series of fraud cases involving government programs where most of the defendants have roots in Somalia — surged officers into the state as part of his nationwide effort to deport millions of people.
In a statement announcing the operation, Homeland Security officials said Minnesota is “ground zero for the war on fraud.”
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is reviewing thousands of refugees who were lawfully admitted to the country under former President Biden, while Homeland Security officials broadly canceled legal protections for roughly 1 million immigrants who entered the country during that time.
Trump directed an overhaul of the nation’s refugee admissions program last year to study whether allowing refugees into the country was even in the interest of the U.S.
That includes prioritizing admissions for white South Africans and putting a ceiling on the overall number of refugee admissions each year to just 7,500, down from 125,000 in the previous fiscal year.
