Thi Dua Vang had just heard from federal officials that she was going to be released after two weeks of immigration detention in Texas.
“Are you going home by car or plane?” a Hmong interpreter asked the St. Paul woman, who speaks little English, over the phone. Vang didn’t have an answer.
Alone in Houston, Vang said she asked if she could wait inside the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) processing center for a relative to pick her up.
But Vang said federal agents refused. “They forced me outside and told me they didn’t care if I lived or died,” she told Sahan Journal through a Hmong interpreter.
Vang isn’t the only Minnesotan released from immigration detention with no way home. In the last two months, hundreds of Minnesota residents have been swept up in an operation that brought as many as 3,000 ICE and Border Patrol agents to Minnesota.
The operation, which began Dec. 1 with a focus on undocumented immigrants, took on an additional target in January with Operation PARRIS, which called for additional scrutiny of 5,600 Minnesota refugees already in the pipeline to legal permanent residency. Many of those detained were rapidly shipped to out-of-state facilities in Texas or Louisiana after their arrest.
On Jan. 28, a federal judge in Minnesota ordered ICE to release and return all refugees arrested in Operation PARRIS.
In recent weeks, lawyers have filed a flurry of successful court challenges compelling the government to release their clients, but that has left an increasing number of Minnesotans stranded outside detention facilities far from home. In some cases, ICE has refused to return identification cards or work permits to those released from detention, attorneys say.
“I was happy that I was released, but scared that I was thrown out there when I didn’t have my brother and husband there,” Vang said. “It was so late and I’m scared there might be bad people out there and there’s no one to help me.”
ICE and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) did not respond to requests for comment on this story.
A frantic pickup
Wa Chi Minh Vang, Thi Dua’s brother, said he drove with her husband, A Pao Giang, from Minnesota to Houston because she couldn’t fly back since ICE had not returned important documents, like her Social Security card or state ID.
An immigration judge granted her bond on Jan. 20. The two men started driving that day to meet Thi Dua so they could help her back home. The next day, Wa Chi Minh said he received an email in the afternoon saying that Thi Dua was scheduled for release. The email had no details on how to pick her up or whether ICE would return her on a plane home.
The men arrived in Houston that night and drove all over the city to find Thi Dua Vang. With her phone, she took a photo of the outside of the ICE detention processing center to show her location.
“We were so happy when we saw her,” Wa Chi Minh told the Sahan Journal. Thi Dua had waited there for nearly three hours outside the ICE facility.
Thi Dua Vang was arrested on the morning of Jan. 8. She was held for a day in the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building at Fort Snelling, which houses ICE offices and a processing center for detainees, before she was transferred to Texas. She stayed in the El Paso Service Processing Center for a couple of days and then transferred to the Joe Corley Processing Center in Houston, Texas. She was detained for nearly two weeks.
Since her release, Thi Dua Vang said she still feels unsafe. Federal agents have visited her St. Paul home three times and she’s not sure why, she said.
“It traumatized me, and it reminded me of what I went through in Vietnam,” she said. “It’s going to be a couple of long years because of the president and his policies, and I’m waiting for the time to feel free again.”
No recourse after ICE release
When someone is arrested by immigration agents, a first step for family members is to check the ICE detainee locator. But 10 immigration attorneys who spoke with Sahan Journal said it’s taking longer for that site to update.
Some detainees are transferred out of state within hours of their arrest, before they can contact an attorney.
“There’s a part of me that wonders, given the speed of the transportation to Texas, I’m not even sure that they know who that person is before they put them on a plane,” said Linus Chan, an immigration attorney and director of the Detainee Rights Clinic at the University of Minnesota Law School.
Minnesota immigration attorney Nico Ratkowski has won multiple habeas cases this year for clients held out-of-state. Habeas corpus cases force officials to justify the legal basis of a person’s detainment or imprisonment.
While the filings often lead to the client’s release from immigration holding centers, they also create tension, he told Sahan Journal.
“Do we want them released because it’s a terrible situation? Or is it better to sit for two days and be shackled on a plane ride home?” he said. “There’s a different answer for every person.”
A few members of a local church drove to Texas in January to pick up one client who had a pending refugee application, Ratkowski said. Another client decided to spend a few more days behind bars to get a free ride back. When ICE releases someone after a judicial order, there’s no apology or funding to get back home.
“As far as recourse goes, there’s none,” Ratkowski said.
Tracking people arrested by ICE isn’t easy. Detainees are often shipped out of Minnesota to detention centers in Louisiana or Texas within 48 hours. Immigration lawyers and family members rely on the ICE detainee locator system, but it can be unreliable.
“ICE and their attorneys have been unable to answer for the number of people they are arresting, or follow through the logistics,” said St. Paul immigration attorney Graham Ojala-Barbour said.
Fleeing religious persecution in Vietnam
Thi Dua Vang came to the United States in 2023 as a refugee after her brother, Wa Chi Minh Vang, sponsored her. As Christians, she and her brother fled religious persecution from her home country of Vietnam.
She has a pending application for permanent residency status, also known as a green card. She doesn’t speak English well, so after her arrest, she constantly worried about where federal agents were taking her, she said.
“I was very sad that I couldn’t call my family to tell them where I was going, and I was afraid they couldn’t find me,” she said. “I was crying hard and I felt hopeless.”
At least 150 Minnesota refugees, including Thi Dua Vang, were arrested in January as part of Operation PARRIS spearheaded by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and the Department of Homeland Security. Most of them were transferred to Texas, and some have been released and left to find their own way home.
Detainees lost in the system
When an attorney wins a habeas petition case and their client is released, that’s not the end of the battle. Next they have to find them. Ojala-Barbour said sometimes even the U.S. attorney working the case doesn’t know where someone is being held, and has to call ICE to track them down.
His client, Juan Tobay Robles, didn’t make it home to Minnesota until Jan. 31, more than two weeks after Chief U.S. District Court Judge Patrick Schiltz ordered his release.
Tobay Robles, originally from Ecuador, was detained by ICE agents on Jan. 6. A dozen or so agents hauled him to the Whipple Building near the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. Within 48 hours he was in Texas.
On Jan. 14, Schiltz granted a habeas petition releasing Tobay Robles. But a week later he remained in custody, prompting his attorney, Ojala-Barbour, to ask the court for his immediate release. The case drew national headlines when Schiltz ordered Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons to either appear in court to explain himself or be held in contempt.
Tobay Robles wanted to be brought back to Minnesota, where he has lived for more than two decades. But after an additional week in a detention center where he was suffering from insufficient treatment to a medical condition, according to Ojala-Barbour, he just wanted to get out.
ICE released Tobay Robles from the El Valle Detention Center in southeast Texas on Jan. 27. A relative drove from the Twin Cities to a town on the border to pick him up.
Tobay Robles may have had one of the better outcomes, after his arrest. Some clients are not showing up on the ICE website for days, while others have not shown up since the beginning of Operation Metro Surge on Dec. 1, according to local attorneys.
“There is no uniformity or consistency as to why Minnesotans are disappearing in the government’s system, nor is there a justifiable basis for that either,” said Irina Vaynerman, CEO of Groundwork Legal, a statewide legal nonprofit working on immigration cases.
