Eric O’Denius entered the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal building in February to give a suitcase full of belongings to a detained immigrant he believed would be deported soon to their home country of Honduras, but staff refused to let him pass off the luggage.
Detained immigrants weren’t allowed to take personal belongings with them when they were flown out of state during Operation Metro Surge, the largest immigration enforcement operation in U.S. history.
“What the hell?!” thought a shocked O’Denius.
“You’re not supposed to have a meltdown when you’re a paralegal, but God, I almost had one at that point,” he told Sahan Journal as he recounted the experience.
O’Denius walked into the Whipple Building every day for 24 years, where he worked as a deportation officer. He retired in 2021, and now walks into the same building as a paralegal studying immigration — working on the other side.
“I’ve been going two or three times a week. It’s pretty dang ugly,” he said. “And for what? They’re doing this plan — whatever — but gosh darn it, there’s good reason to slow down, rethink the issue, think about what you’re trying to do here.”
Some of the things he did as a deportation officer have been flipped upside down in the past few months, like ensuring immigrants left the state with their belongings. He said he and his colleagues also avoided making legally questionable arrests.
These days, he’s come closer to having many meltdowns since Operation Metro Surge began in December and ramped up in January. The operation faced backlash as federal agents detained children, U.S. citizens and people with no criminal history. Agents also broke into homes without warrants, used excessive force on civilian protesters and racially profiled citizens.
Federal officers shot and killed Renee Nicole Macklin Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis while they observed immigration enforcement, and shot and wounded Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis in the leg after mistaking him for someone who was wanted for immigration issues.
“I’m still scratching my head at the fundamental reason why a lot of this happened in the first place,” O’Denius said. “If I wasn’t concerned about some of the things I’ve seen, especially some of it which is privileged, I wouldn’t be human.”
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An activist wife
O’Denius met his wife, Heidi Rae O’Denius, a few years before he retired. They instantly clicked, although she was a bit hesitant because of his job. But they quickly fell in love and got married. They align with each other in many ways, Heidi said, but have different political views.
“When I look at how he talks about his history and when he shares what he’s learning and what’s changed — he just wanted to serve our country and do it right, do it honorably,” she said.
As immigration enforcement ramped up, Heidi became more involved in activism, speaking out against ICE activity. She taught others how to make signs. She attended protests, including one at the Whipple Building the day after Good was shot. Heidi was tear-gassed and pushed to the ground by federal officers outside the Whipple Building. Panicked, she called O’Denius and asked him to pick her up.
“No announcements, no warning, and then more pepper spray,” she said of federal agents’ actions that day. “They [agents] kept running off to the side to grab people.”
O’Denius noticed that the federal officers looked uncomfortable when he picked up his wife. He knew right away that they were from U.S. Customs and Border Protection and didn’t have the proper training to handle civil unrest and rioting.
Agents were running into the crowd of protesters, showing a “lack of discipline,” he said.
Pulled to the other side
Immigration attorneys often approached O’Denius while he was a deportation officer with questions about their clients’ cases. After he retired, they still kept calling him. By the end of 2024, he decided that if he was going to continue helping them, he would need to go back to school and earn his paralegal certification.
He’s now working as a student paralegal in Steven Thal’s Minneapolis-based law firm. Thal, who’s known O’Denius for years, said he wasn’t surprised when he heard O’Denius wanted to be an immigration paralegal.
“He was highly respected by the local consuls representing foreign governments where he was just doing his job, but obviously facilitating things in a respectful, humanitarian manner,” Thal said. “I think he’s somewhat appalled by what he’s seeing of ICE actions here during [Operation] Metro Surge.”
O’Denius worked in several different jobs at the Department of Homeland Security. In his early years, he drove a van transporting detainees to deportation flights. After 9/11, he said the agency began looking to hire more personnel, so he jumped at the opportunity to level up in his career. He worked as a security guard at immigration court, an immigration enforcement officer interviewing detainees in prisons and jails, a deportation officer obtaining travel documents and more.
“Every year the jobs would go up for bid, like who wants to do this kind of job and they go by seniority, so I’ve been around so long I could pretty much have my pick of what I wanted,” he told Sahan Journal.
He was also assigned to teams that worked on major immigration cases, such as the investigation of Swift & Co. in 2006. More than 100 federal officers raided a Swift meat processing plant in Worthington that year and arrested 239 people, according to the Minnesota Historical Society.
Many children were separated from their parents, and found out about the raid when no one picked them up from school. The raid was the largest single worksite immigration enforcement action in U.S. history.
The investigation involved multiple federal agencies and focused on allegations of wage slavery, human trafficking and underage employees working with dangerous machinery, O’Denius said. Attorneys and social workers were present at the processing plant, he added.
While the raid left children unattended and traumatized the community for decades afterwards, O’Denius cited the investigation as an example of good immigration enforcement practices.
“It was a really interesting all hands-on kind of approach,” he said. “I almost missed those old days.”
Immigration transformation under Trump
The Department of Homeland Security has changed slightly under each presidential administration, O’Denius said, but President Donald Trump’s second term transformed it.
“We are seeing it if you just cranked it to 11,” he said.
O’Denius started to see the first signs of changes in December. Federal agents descended on Minnesota for Operation Metro Surge targeting the Somali community. The effort ramped up in January with thousands more agents being sent to Minnesota targeting more communities.
“I realized things were getting weird,” he said. “I could have given a thousand different ways to do this without creating all these issues. You could have done something along the lines of Swift [& Co.] where you’re getting more agencies involved, and narrowing the class of people you’re looking for.”
Then, he received a call on Jan. 11 from a frantic attorney from South Dakota, who was searching for her client in Minnesota, a refugee who was detained by immigration agents. The woman had been separated from her 6-month-old, U.S.-born baby, who was being breastfed.
O’Denius helped the attorney write a letter addressed to the director of the ICE field office at the Whipple Building asking that the woman be released from federal custody, and delivered it himself. He was told she had already been transported to a detention facility in Texas. He then brought the issue to the attention of the federal Chief Counsel’s office and told the duty attorney on site, but said they did nothing to help.
The woman’s attorney eventually filed a habeas petition, and a judge ordered the woman’s release.
“The thing is that that shouldn’t have needed habeas intervention,” O’Denius said, because the woman was a refugee, had no criminal history and was nursing a child who is a U.S. citizen. “That should have been obvious to anybody.”
He spent years reading arrest warrants and signing final orders of deportation, and said he couldn’t think of a reason why federal officers would arrest refugees, who are legally resettled in the United States through a highly vetted nationwide program. Refugees are allowed to legally work in the country as they pursue U.S. citizenship.
“You bet I’m disturbed or concerned,” he said of his feelings about the immigration tactics being used in Minnesota. “I’m not scared, but I’m not scared because I know the law, but to most people and certainly to the immigrant community, people can be scared and if they’re scared or alarmed, I’m not going to tell anybody how they should feel, but am I concerned? Yeah, I’m concerned about the whole situation.”
As a paralegal, he completes tasks for attorneys, such as conducting research, picking up documents and writing declarations in legal proceedings. He helped several attorneys get important documents, including drivers licenses and Social Security cards, returned to clients who were being released without documents that had been confiscated by the federal government.
“The agency was pretty much ducking its responsibility on property, money, medication and documents,” O’Denius said, referring to the Department of Homeland Security. “It was just absolutely beyond its pale.”
As Operation Metro Surge drew widespread national and international attention, O’Denius couldn’t help but feel sad that public perception had turned against the agency he once called home, even though he disagreed with what he was witnessing in the federal operation.
However, he declined to comment on Good and Pretti’s killings, saying only that he expects that litigation will reveal the truth. He also declined to comment on specific statements Trump officials made about Minnesota and Operation Metro Surge. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and Border Patrol Commander Greg Bovino have repeatedly said the government was catching the “worse of the worst,” and defended the killings of Good and Pretti, whom Trump officials described as “domestic terrorists.”
O’Denius said he’s sharing his story, because despite his loyalty to his former employer, he won’t “blindly accept” the government’s actions during Operation Metro Surge.
“There are a lot of things I have not done right in my day. I’ve screwed up in a lot of areas, goodness knows. I’m human like anybody else,” he said. “But I don’t want it said, when it’s all said and done, that I was tried and found wanting because I didn’t say something when I felt I had to say it.”
