The texts and calls came in night and day.
From a daughter of an immigrant whose mother may have been summoned by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
From a diabetic Somali man who didn’t know what documents he should carry to prove his citizenship while on his way to dialysis three times a week.
“Is this letter real? Should I go to this appointment or could it get me detained? How do I safely reschedule while we verify it?” the callers asked.
For months during Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity in Minnesota, Cecil Adli Fountain did not switch off her phone.
She told her team to respond to calls and messages from the community as much as they could, even beyond regular hours.
“We were flying solo,” said the newly appointed assistant director at the Minnesota Council of Churches’ (MCC) Mankato office, whose staff was trying to answer questions better handled by immigration lawyers.
As thousands of federal agents poured into Minnesota during Operation Metro Surge, the impact rippled out across the state. From Perham to Waite Park, Red Wing to Pelican Rapids and Mankato, community groups were flooded with requests for legal help, translation services, grocery and rent support, and rides to school and work.
As hyper-local organizations mobilized to meet urgent needs, the surge also revealed immigrant communities in parts of Minnesota that legal clinics and advocacy groups said they had not previously reached. Community organizations say the moment reshaped their role, while legal providers say it forced a reckoning with the inadequate reach of their services to far-flung and emerging immigrant communities.
The importance of local response
At a community appreciation event last month, Hispanic Outreach of Goodhue County brought volunteers and some of the impacted families together for the first time since the drawdown of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol agents in Minnesota.
Standing at the dais of the First Lutheran Church of Red Wing, Hispanic Outreach’s Adriana Thuerauf addressed a full room. “If you delivered groceries to your neighbor in the past few months, please stand up. If you did ICE watch in your neighborhood, please stand up. If you drove your immigrant neighbors to work, please stand up.”
Gradually, the entire room stood up, each looking at the person next to them. A few tables over were some of the immigrant families and individuals they had helped.
Maria, a mother of seven from Mexico, was among them. She came up to the dais to thank her neighbors. “I am one of the families that was very afraid during the ICE activity,” she said. “You haven’t seen me before but I received a lot of help from you. Thank you for everything you guys did [for] us.”
Maria has lived in Red Wing for 12 years. These past few months have been the most nerve-wracking for her. She relied heavily on Hispanic Outreach for financial and legal support.
“It’s wonderful what Hispanic Outreach has done for us, but it is very important to have legal help in the area consistently and not just during moments of crisis,” Maria’s daughter Sarah Brown told Sahan Journal. “It’s easy for people to say ‘Why haven’t they become citizens yet?’ but the process feels like rowing a boat with your hands.”
Now, months into the drawdown, Hispanic Outreach Executive Director Lucy Richardson’s team continues to get questions about everything from work permits to Delegation of Parental Authority for kids whose parents have been deported or decided to return to their home country — questions better answered by a lawyer.
“There’s a lot of miseducation, lack of awareness of what could happen” in individual immigration cases, Richardson said. “With that big a gap, by the time someone reaches out to us, sometimes it is kind of late.”
Her team has tried to patch together the missing legal resources by bringing in volunteers, raising funds and creating resource guides. They put out calls for help to community members who showed up to drive their neighbors to immigration appointments — sometimes even out of state. “We had to shift the work that we were doing and instead focus on what was the need at that time, which was to be in touch with families through our communication tools,” she said.
Richardson said the way they operated during the crisis will continue to shape and guide their work in the community, particularly as they try to address some of the most significant gaps in legal support.
Her organization has in the past worked with the Binger Center for New Americans at the University of Minnesota Law School. With the help of law students, the center offers pop-up clinics across the state to reach rural immigrant communities.
“[The] silver lining from really oppressive federal immigration regimes is seeing how important the local response really is,” said Sarah Brenes, executive director of the Binger Center. She said that not only did the past few months reveal blind spots in who they were reaching, but also made them realize the importance of working with community partners to identify immigrant communities and build trust.
“I think the knowledge that community partners have about the needs of the community has grown,” Brenes said.
Putting new immigrant communities on the map
Brenes has been struck by hearing from community members and organizations across the state who have been reaching out for help on behalf of their immigrant neighbors. “We used to be able to know where our clients are,” she said. But now, new immigrant communities “are putting small towns in rural Minnesota on the map.”
These past few months have been a wake-up call for local organizations even in some communities with long-existing immigrant populations.
“When I talk to people that doesn’t live in our area, I always try to remind them that you cannot imagine how many [immigrant] communities are in our area,” Fabiola Velasquez, a community organizer at Fe Y Justicia, said.
“At the same time, if it’s a little, remote town, which many towns in greater Minnesota are, there is less help and less resources of any kind, not just immigration or legal representation, and there is language barrier and education barriers as well.”
Velasquez lives in Waite Park outside of St. Cloud, but her work as community organizer at Fe y Justicia, a women-lead Latinx organization, spans immigrant communities across central Minnesota — from Monticello to Perham and Pelican Rapids. Despite the deep roots of her organization in her community, she, too, said that it is often difficult to find all the people who need help.
“It’s not until something horrible happens that we know that there are a bunch of people going through [a certain] situation,” Velasquez said. “So these times also make us realize how many of us are here and what our struggles are.”
In recent weeks, Fe y Justicia has been fielding questions from the community about self-deportation and “safe” ways to leave the country, while keeping open the door for their U.S.-born children to return. Velasquez said they try to arrange legal consultations for these callers, but those answer general information questions and don’t get to the specifics of people’s cases.
Two hours north of Waite Park, immigrants in Pelican Rapids face similar challenges. The city in Otter Tail County has a population of just over 2,500, including many immigrants who work at the local turkey plant.
The Pelican Rapids Multicultural Committee has long worked to help bridge the gap between long-time residents and immigrants through festivals and gatherings. Even to them, the surge activity brought to the forefront the severe lack of resources in the area, when ICE came to the community in January.
“It took us a long time to track down the people that we knew had been taken,” said Joan Ellison, vice president of the Pelican Rapids Multicultural Committee.
Ellison said she has been working with legal aid groups in the Twin Cities and in North Dakota that have more resources, but legal help is spotty and often inaccessible. “Frequently, it’s both members of the family that work at the turkey plant. They can’t go to Minneapolis. They can’t go to Fargo during work hours. I’ve been so frustrated with how constrained it is [for] the immigrants in Pelican that need help,” Ellison said.
“The little red cards that we put out that say these are your rights on the back, you’re supposed to write the telephone number of your lawyer. I don’t think there’s any person in Pelican Rapids who is a recent immigrant who has a lawyer. They can’t afford a lawyer. They don’t even know where to ask,” she said.
Moving goalposts
While legal resources were already scarce, demand for them has surged in recent months — driven not only by heightened ICE activity, but also by rapidly shifting immigration rules, including attempts by the Trump administration to end temporary protected status for immigrants from Somalia, Myanmar, Afghanistan and Venezuela, among other countries.
“It is really hard to keep up with everything that is happening right now,” said Velasquez. “We used to tell them, ‘if you cannot afford a lawyer right now, you can present yourself at court, or your immigration check in, because that’s better than missing it. And people felt comfortable doing that, going by themselves and explaining to the judge or the agent that they cannot afford a lawyer right now, but they’re working on it,” Velasquez said.
In Trump 2.0, that’s not the case anymore.
“Now we don’t recommend anyone to go and present themselves to court or do a check-in without at least having that with a lawyer. So we need more attorneys and more consultations than ever, just because we’re not able to help as much as we used to with the knowledge that we had,” Velasquez said. “I cannot measure how much help and how much things we need, and how bad is the lack of resources in our area, and I’m sure we were not able to help a lot of people, even though we did as much as we could.”
Lessons learned
The pace of policy changes has also forced legal organizations to spend more time repeatedly explaining new rules and protections to clients, rather than advancing individual cases.
“It’s been kind of like whiplash” for legal providers, too, said Lou Her, the program lead of the immigration unit at South Minnesota Regional Legal Services that serves five metro counties as well as 33 others across southern Minnesota. “It’s been really a challenge to plan and figure out what the next step is and be on top of what can happen,” Her said.
In Willmar and St. Cloud, Yasin Alsaidi’s team at Mid-Minnesota Legal Aid, which serves 20 counties with four attorneys and paralegals, has also been stretched thin. The people who work for him were scared to come to work. They’ve been “extremely overwhelmed,” he said. “There are still gaps. … We’re trying to do the maximum impact with the resources that we have. … In St. Cloud, we have a very limited amount of immigration lawyers. That is [the case] for Willmar as well. The problem is, even the immigration lawyers that we have, they don’t deal with removal. They only do work permits, business immigration or family-type of immigration.”
Her and Alsaidi, like the other legal providers Sahan Journal spoke to, said that the past few months have forced them to rethink how they serve immigrant communities outside the Twin Cities. For example, Her has been working with clients virtually to provide consultation. She said the organization might adopt a hybrid approach going forward to reach more people.
While much of the work has been reactive to the rapid changes, attorneys say the period has also revealed long-term lessons, like the importance of partnering with local community organizations to set up virtual legal consultations for immigrants who may lack internet access, transportation or familiarity with the legal system.
“I feel like some of the changes that we’re implementing now with our work and the work in general will probably stay for a very long time,” Her said.
Fountain believes so, too.
As an immigrant from Sudan who arrived in the United States in the early 2000s, she said she understands the fear and confusion many immigrants are now experiencing. “I definitely would have panicked. I would have been so confused; a lot of questions would have been going through my head,” she said. She, too, would have relied on an organization like hers during such an uncertain moment.
In the current climate meeting those questions and needs will increasingly depend on collaboration among organizations serving immigrant communities.
“[It] opened our eyes, all of us, to the weakness of each system. It just opened a lot of potential, made people be more creative and and more effective on the way how to deliver their services. People are going to see their client differently going forward, and there’ll be a more sensitivity towards the people that we’re helping, from the first encounter with the client all the way until needs are met. And just because the needs are met doesn’t mean that it will stop,” she said.
