Local attorneys are concerned that increased immigration enforcement this year is leading to the relocation of more ICE detainees outside of Minnesota, making it hard for detainees to contact their lawyers and families.
Several lawyers who spoke to Sahan Journal believe that a recent wave of transfers was made to accommodate ICE’s “Operation Metro Surge,” which began the week of Dec.1 focused on the Somali community. It also swept up many Latino and some Southeast Asian detainees.
Immigration attorneys say that transferring detainees outside of the state puts a toll on detainees and their families, and potentially violates their clients’ due process rights. They also say ICE’s relocation strategy appears to be aimed at discouraging detainees and attorneys from litigating their cases.
“It was almost a whack-a-mole, chase your client around the country: ‘Let’s hide this person until they give up,’” said Minneapolis immigration attorney David Wilson.
An ICE spokesperson did not return requests for comment for this story. Last Friday, ICE issued a prepared statement claiming they’ve made more than 400 arrests in Minnesota this month, and provided a list of 10 arrestees with violent crime convictions. However, local immigration lawyers have said law-abiding Minnesotans are being arrested. A recent New York Times data analysis also found that during past major ICE operations, more than half of noncitizens arrested had no criminal records.
“Since this most recent operation, there have been pretty large-scale transfers of people detained in facilities in Minnesota out of the state,” said Ben Gleekel, an attorney with the St. Paul-based Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota.
Wilson told Sahan Journal that although he doesn’t have a good estimate, he believes several ICE detainees in the Kandiyohi County jail in southern Minnesota were transferred in the last few weeks to the Port Isabel Service Processing Center in southern Texas. ICE also shipped many detainees to the Douglas County jail in Superior, Wisconsin, Wilson said.
All of these detainees were “long-termers” who had been in jail for several months to more than a year in some cases, Wilson added.
Data analyzed by Sahan Journal shows that between September 2023 and Oct. 15, 2025, approximately 2,800 immigration detainees were booked into ICE detention centers in Minnesota. Over half of these detainees – 1,586 – were later transferred to facilities outside of the state.
About a third of the relocated detainees – 561 – were transferred for immediate removal and deported within two days; at least 98 detainees were held for more than a month outside of Minnesota.
This data, obtained and published by the Deportation Data Project through a Freedom of Information Act request, is the most recent ICE enforcement data available at the individual level.
The Kandioyi, Sherburne and Freeborn county jails in Minnesota contract with the federal government to hold ICE detainees. ICE is considering opening a fourth detention center in Appleton, Minnesota.
A handful of local immigration lawyers told Sahan Journal their clients in ICE detention are being sent to facilities in surrounding states. Minnesota has a higher immigrant population compared to surrounding states, according to the Migration Policy Institute, which may explain why detention beds are available in neighboring states, Gleekel said. ICE and local contracting jails do not divulge the number of immigration detainee beds available in Minnesota.
Detainees transferred further away to detention centers in states like Texas and Louisiana are usually on the cusp of deportation, Gleekel said, while those transferred to closer states like Nebraska and Iowa will likely be held in detention longer term.
Immigrant advocates tell Sahan Journal they’ve been seeing relocations outside of the state play out all year.
“It’s very common for someone in deportation to be moved,” said Edwin Torres Desantiago, a manager with the Immigrant Defense Network. “It makes it hard for families to track where they’re going.”
Transfers ramped up with Trump efforts
Wilson, who estimates that he files an average of three habeas corpus motions every week this year, said the height of transfers among his clients occurred earlier this year as ICE’s activity ramped up under the new Trump administration.
Wilson is known in Minnesota for filing habeas corpus motions in federal court, which argue that a person can’t be detained for long periods of time when the likelihood of their deportation is uncertain.
Attorneys need to know where their client is detained so they can file such motions in the right district – that is, a motion cannot be filed in Minnesota if someone was arrested here but sent out of state. Yet four immigration attorneys who spoke with Sahan Journal said the government rarely, if ever, notifies attorneys before transferring their clients.
“A lot of immigration attorneys were up in arms in the spring, especially when you’re trying to do a bond hearing and you don’t even know where your client is,” Wilson said. “They [the government] kept moving them around. The hope of that seemed like it was a game of, ‘Let’s hide the person long enough so [attorneys] give up.’”
At that time, Wilson said he would first go to immigration court, which is separate from federal district court, and fight for his clients’ release there. But too often he would go to immigration court, only to be told his client had been transferred out of state.
Now, he skips immigration court, files the habeas motion in federal district court, and “the first thing we ask for is to keep the person here.” This tactic has been largely successful in preventing his clients from being transferred, Wilson said.
ICE rarely notifies family, attorneys of transfers
ICE transferred many of Gleekel’s clients throughout the year, and he finds out in one of two ways: either the client calls him from the new jail they were moved to, or a client’s family member calls him. Usually, it’s the latter.
“There’ve only been a couple of people who had the opportunity to let me know they were being transferred” before they were relocated, he said. “But they didn’t know where they were going, so it took time to locate them.”
To his knowledge, ICE is not required to notify attorneys or family members when detainees are transferred.
“We honestly, once the dust settles, need to look into that,” Gleekel said, “because I’ve never been notified by the government that a client of mine is being transferred, and I can’t think of any instance where that’s happened for colleagues of mine in my office or other organizations that I work closely with.”
Only a large organization such as the American Civil Liberties Union could effectively challenge ICE on this matter legally, he added.
“But there’s so many different issues right now that it’s hard to say that anyone would want to prioritize it at this moment,” he said.
Like Gleekel, St. Cloud immigration attorney Stacey Rogers recently found out ICE transferred one of her clients from Minnesota to Texas when the client called her. Authorities transferred Rogers’ client, who had been detained in Minnesota since May 2024, in late November in an attempt to deport him to his native Guatemala.
“They [immigration authorities] came to him at 10:00 p.m. and said, ‘I need your ID, you’re leaving,’” Rogers said. “They got him up at 2:00 a.m. the next morning and shipped him out. No one heard from him for 24 hours and no one told me.”
Rogers was able to temporarily prevent her client’s deportation and is still fighting his case.
She estimates that a little more than half of her 30 clients in ICE detention this year have been transferred to other states this year.
“They should notify the attorneys,” Rogers said.
Like Wilson, each time she picks up a new client, Rogers now requests that ICE doesn’t transfer them out of state.
Data methodology
Sahan Journal analyzed ICE detention data from September 2023 through mid-October 2025, obtained and published by the Deportation Data Project. ICE has not disclosed more recent detention data.
We first filtered this data to include all detention records at the three ICE detention facilities in Minnesota – the Sherburne, Kandiyohi and Freeborn county jails. We excluded all records where the detainee was first detained in another state and was later transferred to detention in Minnesota.
We determined the first out-of-state transfer for people who were first detained in Minnesota. We then calculated the amount of time those detainees spent in custody outside of Minnesota by summing the number of detention days recorded at all out-of-state facilities.
We also created general categories for how long people remained in out-of-state custody:
- Immediate removal: detention that lasted under two days, followed immediately by the detainee’s deportation.
- Short detention: fewer than 30 days.
- Long-term detention: 30 days or more.
These thresholds are created for the purpose of this analysis and do not reflect ICE standards.
If you have any questions regarding our analysis, please contact data reporter Cynthia Tu at ctu@sahanjournal.com.
Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated the average of ICE transfers in 2025 (as of mid-October) after dividing the total by 12 months rather than the 10.5 months of available data. The corrected average is 114.
