Just moments after the Trump administration announced an end on Thursday to the immigration crackdown that has destabilized life in Minnesota, Graham Ojala-Barbour, an immigration lawyer in St. Paul, logged into virtual court hearings for two clients being detained in New Mexico, a thousand miles from the Twin Cities.
His clients are among thousands of people arrested last month in the administration’s immigration dragnet in Minnesota. Even once federal agents leave, the cases will continue jamming federal courtrooms in the state and around the country.
Agents shot three people during their operations in Minneapolis last month, including two U.S. citizens who were killed. Furious protests spread across the United States as videos of the administration’s aggressive tactics circulated widely, calling into question the White House depiction of the shootings and the enforcement surge.
While the agents may no longer be surveilling schools and neighborhoods, pulling people out of their cars and off the sidewalk, the operation will have long-term impacts in courtrooms and detention centers. Judges, defense lawyers and prosecutors have all complained of being overwhelmed with cases, while an unknown number of people remain in custody.
“Even if the constant emergency of this siege ends now,” Mr. Ojala-Barbour said, “we still have a lot of fallout from it.”
Some detainees are being held in the Whipple Federal Building, a complex on the edge of Minneapolis that has become a draw for demonstrators. But others have been flown to detention centers hundreds of miles away, in states including Texas and New Mexico.
“One of the massive, opaque boxes in ICE’s purview is the world of detention,” said Gracie Willis, a lawyer with the National Immigration Project, an organization of lawyers and advocates who have represented clients in the Twin Cities. “There is just no way for anybody outside of that to have a meaningful sense of who’s in detention where.”
The Trump administration portrayed its crackdown as an effort to get dangerous criminals off the streets and address accusations of widespread fraud in state welfare programs. “As a result of our efforts here, Minnesota is now less of a sanctuary state for criminals,” Tom Homan, the White House border czar, said on Thursday, though the administration has so far not documented any specific changes in state or local policies.
Meanwhile, lawyers in the Twin Cities have been waging a pitched battle in paperwork and online court filings to release clients who they say were illegally detained.
“When they said they were looking for ‘the worst of the worst,’” said Paschal O. Nwokocha, an immigration lawyer in Minneapolis, referencing a phrase often used by administration officials to describe their targets, “that just drives me up the wall.”
Instead, many of the more than 4,000 people caught in the federal dragnet had no criminal records and were pursuing legal status, Mr. Nwokocha and many other defense lawyers have said. A lack of federal agents on the streets won’t end their legal battles. “If you are in the system,” Mr. Nwokocha said, “you are in the system.”
The work of immigration lawyers has been particularly knotty because of changes in the legal landscape. Last year, the Trump administration moved to make virtually everyone who is in the country unlawfully subject to mandatory detention, a change that was affirmed in September by the Board of Immigration Appeals at the Justice Department.
That took discretion away from immigration court judges, prompting lawyers to take their cases to federal courts overseen by the Justice Department. In January, court dockets in Minnesota were flooded with habeas corpus petitions, which invoke the U.S. Constitution to compel the government to justify holding someone in custody.
The top federal prosecutor in Minnesota, Daniel N. Rosen, a Trump nominee, acknowledged in a court filing last month that his office had been overwhelmed with habeas petitions at a time when its civil division was severely understaffed.
“This flood of new litigation imposes an enormous burden on this U.S. attorney’s office,” Mr. Rosen wrote, adding that his office “has been forced to shift its already limited resources from other pressing and important priorities.”
The chief federal judge in Minnesota also excoriated U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement last month, saying it had violated nearly 100 court orders stemming from its aggressive crackdown in the state. The judge, Patrick J. Schiltz, wrote in a ruling that ICE had disobeyed more judicial directives in January alone than “some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence.”
A spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security said in an email on Friday that the Trump administration was “more than prepared to handle the legal caseload” resulting from its immigration crackdown, adding that “no lawbreakers in the history of human civilization have been treated better than illegal aliens in the United States.”
In the vast majority of habeas cases filed in recent months, judges have sided with the detainees and ordered their immediate release, or told immigration judges to hold bond hearings, according to interviews with many immigration lawyers.
Cases against immigrants in Minnesota have also been dismissed or withdrawn for lack of evidence, including on Thursday, when Mr. Rosen acknowledged that officials had provided incorrect information about the shooting of an immigrant by a federal agent last month.
The prosecutor asked a judge to dismiss charges against a man who was wounded in that shooting, as well as another man who had been accused of attacking the agent. Mr. Rosen wrote that “newly discovered evidence in this matter is materially inconsistent with the allegations” that federal officials made in a charging document and in courtroom testimony.
Despite immigration lawyers’ successful track record, the sheer volume of habeas petitions has led to a backlog, overwhelming local lawyers and their counterparts who work for the federal government. “There are still thousands of people that are stuck in these detention facilities around the country,” said Nico Ratkowski, an immigration lawyer in St. Paul.
Yulexi Loor Tacuri, 27, an asylum seeker from Ecuador who was detained by immigration agents in early January, said that she did not trust the federal government to leave her and her neighbors alone, despite the announcement of a drawdown.
“I think they are going to continue,” she said in Spanish, adding, “I think they are saying this so that people relax and feel confident enough to leave their homes, and then they can trap us more quickly.”
Ms. Loor came to the United States in 2021 after fleeing domestic violence in Ecuador, she said. She is one of many South American immigrants living in a community of trailer homes on the outskirts of Minneapolis. Federal agents have been showing up there every morning for the past few weeks, she said. Blinking drones hover overhead at night.
According to court records, Ms. Loor was detained in early January. While driving home from taking her 9-year-old son to school, she said, a flock of federal vehicles surrounded her car. She was arrested and sent to a detention center in Texas, where the authorities fitted her with a chunky black ankle monitor.
She also developed an infection, she said, because the arrest stopped her from breastfeeding her 1-year-old daughter, who was born in the United States and is a citizen.
Mr. Ojala-Barbour, her lawyer, filed a habeas petition that was granted by a federal judge, allowing Ms. Loor to return to her children in Minnesota after more than a week in detention, court records show.
The ankle monitor remains strapped to her leg, and she has been afraid to leave her home much since she returned from Texas, she said. Her asylum case is ongoing.
Jacey Fortin covers a wide range of subjects for The Times, including extreme weather, court cases and state politics across the country.
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