Rosa was unsure what to expect when she received a letter from federal immigration authorities ordering her to appear at the Whipple Federal Building on Jan. 21.
A Venezuelan refugee who came to the United States in Sept. 2024, Rosa had immigrated legally and was in the process of acquiring her green card. She hoped that as a lawful resident with no criminal background, the appearance would be a routine check-in with officials.
Instead, she was detained and sent to Texas within hours.
“I thought, why is this happening to me,” she said in Spanish. “I’m not a criminal. I had already cried the moment they detained me; I cried the whole time.”
Rosa, who is not being identified by her real name for fear of retaliation, was kept in detention for a week and denied her medication. She had no contact with her family or attorney and was unable to shower or brush her teeth.
Rosa is among many legal refugees in Minnesota who were detained last month as part of Operation PARRIS, a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) initiative claiming to target fraud among legal refugees in the state.
In reality, refugees were detained and shipped out of state without due process, advocates and attorneys say.
Now, a legal battle initiated by legal organizations has at least temporarily put a pause on the operation while a judge decides its merits. Rosa and other refugees detained as part of the operation have since been released, though their futures remain uncertain.
Local organizations sue
In mid January, several days after Operation PARRIS was announced, Madeline Lohman, the advocacy and outreach director for the Advocates for Human Rights, began receiving alerts from partners that legal refugees were being detained after meeting with immigration authorities.
Lohman is acutely familiar with the immigration legal system, and said the latest actions by federal immigration authorities against refugees were a clear violation of their rights.
“That you could take somebody that has legal status, because if they were sent back home they could be harmed, that is a direct attack on everything we as an organization stand for,” Lohman said.
The manner in which Operation PARRIS was implemented came as a surprise, she added.
“When Operation PARRIS was announced, they said nothing about arresting people,” Lohman said. “They just said they were going to re-vet documents.”
According to Lohman, refugees are eligible and expected to adjust to permanent residency within a year of arrival, but the related statute does not outline any repercussions if this timeline is not met.
For many refugees, administrative hurdles and growing backlogs at refugee assistance organizations make this timeline unrealistic, said Kathleen Motzenbecker, director of refugee and immigrant services at the Minnesota Council of Churches.
“Right now, we’re at about a two-month backlog of appointments,” she said. “Despite the fact that we have walk-in appointments weekly, we have a huge queue.”
Federal authorities have been sending refugees like Rosa G-56 forms, a form of “call-in” letter, ordering them to appear before immigration authorities. Many of these letters have been remarkably informal, sometimes handwritten, taped to the door and missing an agency logo.
“It’s something a teenager could put together,” Motzenbecker said.
The Advocates for Human Rights, a Minneapolis-based nonprofit, redirected resources to respond to the threat, working with partners and attorneys to file habeas corpus petitions asking federal judges to review unlawful detentions of refugees and to order the federal government to release them from custody.
The organization escalated their efforts on Jan. 23 by filing a class-action lawsuit with a group of refugees represented by the International Refugee Assistance Project, Berger Montague and the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law.
A federal judge issued a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) on Jan. 28 as part of the lawsuit, prohibiting the federal government from continuing arrests and detainments of legally admitted refugees in Minnesota.
The order also required that the government transport existing PARRIS detainees back to Minnesota and release them within five days of the order.
“We think we have a really strong case,” Lohman said. “We’re convinced we’re going to win on the merits, in which case the TRO is an appropriate form of relief because there’s no reason for people to continue to suffer harm.”
The government has filed a motion to dissolve the TRO, and a hearing was held Wednesday on the matter. A hearing will also take place on February 19 to consider a preliminary injunction that would protect Minnesota refugees from being arrested and detained for the duration of the case, according to Lohman.
As of the time of publication, a decision on the motion has not been issued.
Legal refugees held in detention
For refugees like Rosa, the TRO provided desperately needed relief.
Rosa described abysmal conditions while being held in detention. She said she was offered little food and prevented from showering or brushing her teeth.
Within hours of being detained at the Whipple Federal Building on Wednesday, Jan. 21, Rosa was processed by authorities and loaded on a plane to El Paso, Texas, along with multiple buses full of people. She was given one phone call prior to leaving, which she used to contact her family.
In El Paso, Rosa was held in a room with about 60 other women, all from Minnesota. She said they were given sheets, shirts, underwear and socks, but not pants.
A diabetic, Rosa had her medication on hand when she arrived at Whipple. When she asked guards in El Paso for it, she was told she needed to see a doctor first. Rosa said detainees had to fill out a form requesting medical assistance, that was slow to arrive, if ever.
“You had to be practically dying for them to examine you or treat you,” she said. “That was the only way.”
Rosa said being held in such difficult conditions surrounded by strangers was a stressful experience.
“I didn’t feel safe at all because I didn’t know everyone there, but I know that none of us were there because we wanted to be,” she said. “You could feel the tension at times because girls would arrive crying, and many of them weren’t eating because they were depressed.”
Around 11:30 p.m. Jan. 23, Rosa was again loaded onto a bus in Texas and taken to an airport. She said she waited all night in freezing temperatures on the bus before being loaded on a plane back to Minnesota, though authorities did not tell her where she was going.
Back at Whipple, Rosa was held in even worse conditions. Her room did not have beds, only several waist-high walls with thin foam mattresses for detainees to sleep on, and two adjacent latrine-style toilets. She was not fed for 24 hours, was still unable to shower or brush her teeth and was cuffed around her ankles the entire time.
On Jan. 27, after four nights in Whipple, Rosa was called in for an interview with her attorney, Luke Srodulski, and an immigration official.
For seven hours, Rosa answered questions from a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) officer about her time in Venezuela, and her reasons for leaving. She said after being held in such difficult conditions for nearly a week, reliving her past experiences was emotionally draining.
“I wasn’t expecting an interview like that, where first they traumatize me, they take me step by step,” she said. “I’m chained up, I’m without food, without showering. It’s like, they disable your whole body, your mind.”
According to Srodulski, the officer was essentially re-administering an interview Rosa had already completed in Sept. 2024 when she arrived in the United States seeking asylum.
“If they thought there was fraud, they would have targeted the questions,” Srodulski said. “But instead of that, they were just asking a bunch of questions.”
Srodulski and Lohman both said they believe forcing refugees into stressful situations is possibly an intentional tactic the government is using in hopes of catching discrepancies in refugee applications that could then be construed as fraud.
In Rosa’s case, she was returned to detention. The next day, after a federal judge granted the TRO and a different judge ordered that Rosa be released within five days, she was freed and reunited with Srodulski.
Looking out on an uncertain future
Some refugees, like Rosa, were released and returned to Minnesota within the timeframe specified by the TRO. Others, however, have not been. Michelle Eberhard, director of refugee services at the International Institute of Minnesota, said the government has not provided a list of everyone who has been detained under Operation PARRIS, making it difficult to know if they are complying with the court order.
“We had somebody who was just released outside on the streets of Houston this weekend, so there’s not full compliance,” Eberhard said.
Those that were released have not immediately gotten their identification and other immigration papers back, Eberhard added.
Rosa was among those released without her documents. She was provided only a single document saying her application for permanent residency had been approved, and was told to check back in a week for her Minnesota ID, her passport and her refugee approval notice.
This has created additional hurdles for many refugees who are still receiving call-in letters after the TRO to appear in person at the St. Paul USCIS field office.
“Getting your documents back is priority number one for people,” Eberhard said. “They say, you know, ‘I know who I am, but how does anybody else know who I am if I don’t have that?’”
As the future of the TRO and the government’s ability to continue Operation PARRIS proceeds through the legal process, refugees in Minnesota are faced with an uncertain future. Several legal battles remain ahead to uphold the protections established by the TRO, which currently remains in place through Feb. 25.
Today, Rosa is home in Minneapolis with her family and 6-year-old son. Being separated from him was the most difficult part of her detention.
“Every day I cried, because I didn’t know anything about my son,” she said. “My biggest fear was leaving my son here alone.”
Rosa said she still feels unsafe, and fears being taken into detention by federal authorities again. She said that without her documents on hand, authorities could easily claim that she’s here illegally. She works at a local daycare and frequently needs to leave the house, adding to her concern.
Still, Rosa believes her future and her son’s future lie in the United States. Despite the threat posed by immigration authorities, it is here, in America, she said, that she can build the life she dreamed of for her family.
“Because, in part, I came here for him [my son], so that he could have a good future, a future that perhaps I couldn’t have,” she said. “But being here I see that there are many possibilities for me to achieve what I want so much.”