As hundreds of federal immigration agents flooded into Minnesota for Operation Metro Surge, this winter, flights filled with detainees ramped up at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.
Thousands of miles away, in El Paso, Texas, Marisa Limón Garza’s phone started ringing — attorneys, families, friends and friends of friends asking if she could find their loved ones.
“‘Can you go check on my person? Can you make sure they’re OK?’” Garza said, of the calls her staff received at Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center.
In many cases, what callers were seeking was “literally proof of life,” she said.
For Garza, executive director at Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, it was a reminder that even in Texas, which has the highest number of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centers in the country, it was not business as usual.
ICE has long transferred detainees across state lines. But a Sahan Journal analysis in December found that during Operation Metro Surge, more Minnesotans were being transferred out of state — and more quickly — often cutting them off from their families and legal counsel.
In the information vacuum, families and attorneys began calling the people who knew the system best: immigrant advocates on the ground in Texas who became an emergency support system for people they did not expect to serve.
The need for support crystallized ongoing efforts to centralise a response system in Texas. Last week, Together and Free, a local organization launched a detainee hotline in collaboration with other local service providers, advocates and aid workers to help locate people detained in El Paso by consulting with the most relevant organization. The hotline can also help people consult an attorney for legal information, if not representation.
“That’s probably the only good thing to come out of this chaos is a coordination of resources and communication,” Imelda Maynard, legal services director at El Paso-based Estrella del Paso, told Sahan Journal. “It’s definitely made all of us see the need to be coordinated not just regionally, but also nationally.”
A hub for detainees, and advocates helping them
Texas has long been a pass-through destination for immigrants crossing the border from Mexico. The state also has 26 detention centers, including a recently opened tent facility in Fort Bliss — Camp East Montana — with a capacity to hold up to 5,000 people, making it the largest in the country.
It didn’t take long before the pipeline of detention from Minnesota to Texas became a black box.
For lawyers, relatives, and advocates in Minnesota trying to navigate Camp East Montana from hundreds of miles away, even basic access felt out of reach. Daniel Hatoum, a senior supervising attorney at the Texas Civil Rights Project, described locating and assisting detainees there from outside the system as “damn near impossible.”
These organizations say they used their institutional knowledge, physical proximity to the detention centers, and years-long contacts with officers when the need arises. Despite shifting policies, undertrained detention staff and limited capacity, the expertise these organizations have built over years of navigating Texas detention centers is now serving those from cities thousands of miles away — Los Angeles, Chicago and, most recently, Minneapolis.
Hatoum and his team helped train people — including some legal teams in Minnesota who reached out for help — file habeas corpus petitions and litigate the cases of their clients, provide information on the detention centers and even communicate with detainees. Hatoum said that they also had volunteers help people from Minnesota figure out the nuts and bolts of the detention system in Texas. He described his role as having had “a small hand in a lot of cases, as opposed to a big hand in one.”
“I get questions daily still for people who were arrested in Minnesota: ‘How can we make this come to light? What steps can we take to get this case moving? These are the medical issues my clients face, and how does the court respond to these? How does [ICE] respond to that argument?’”
Minnesota detainee’s death cuts off access
At Estrella del Paso, Maynard started receiving calls from Minnesota in January after a death at Camp East Montana made an already clogged system even harder to navigate.
Victor Manuel Diaz, a cook at a Coon Rapids restaurant, was detained on Jan. 6 and died a week later at the El Paso camp in what ICE claimed was a suicide. Following his death, visitors from Minnesota were denied access to the detention center. Maynard said there was “no rhyme or reason” given for the restriction. However, while families weren’t allowed entry for a few days following Diaz’s death, lawyers from Estrella and other organizations were able to collect and share information.
The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to Sahan Journal’s requests for comment on how many Minnesotans were detained and still remain in detention at Camp East Montana, ICE locator backlogs and restrictions on access for Minnesota visitors.
During this period, Maynard’s team received repeated requests to help detainees left stranded after their release in Texas without the identification or documents needed to fly home.
“We essentially dug in and relied on our community partnerships to try and just sort of triage initially.” Many released detainees ended up at Annunciation House, an immigrant shelter in El Paso. There they found shelter and received help from staff to arrange travel back to Minnesota.
‘Now, the border is everywhere’
It was not the first time Texas-based organizations had to provide what Garza calls “palliative care” for detainees during an immigration operation.
“There’s always been this kind of institutional knowledge from our nonprofits and our NGOs, about how to respond when the system changes, whether it’s providing shelter, food, transportation and receiving migrants,” said Cindy Ramirez, editor of the nonprofit news outlet El Paso Matters.
“That was kind of a pipeline and a communication and a relationship that has long been established here between law enforcement and immigration enforcement agencies and these nonprofits.”
A similar precedent of interstate collaboration and sharing of resources emerged during the first Trump administration when these organizations were on the front lines helping families torn apart by the family separation policy implemented at the U.S.-Mexico Border.
“Seeing mass groups of people come in, being bused from all different parts of the country, that’s not new here,” Maynard said.
For Garza, however, something was new about this time. “I think what was sobering to me was being on calls with attorneys who are very competent, very excellent at their practice, and they were completely lost,” Garza said. “It really was important that we connected as a community of practice.”
But, she, too, said that the violence and injustice she had witnessed in Texas for decades was unfolding in Minnesota. “It chokes me up,” she said. “It’s heartbreaking to see it happen to others. But in some ways, it also means there are more people willing to stand up against this machine.”
Immigrant-serving nonprofits in El Paso were already stretched thin, trying to respond to changes in federal immigration policy and the influx of detainees from all over the country.
Still, advocates say they want to do everything they can to support out-of-state detainees and their families.
“We have done our best to respond and to take the call, make the visit, share whatever we can in a way that’s manageable for us with our limited capacity,” Garza said. “It’s our responsibility, it’s part of our mission, and it’s best done in collaboration.”
Hatoum said that local organizations like the Texas Civil Rights Project have long been on the front lines because of their proximity to the border. “And now the border is everywhere,” he said.
“The border came to Minnesota in the form of CBP, in the form of excessive force. And now, when it hits other states, we’re still here. We’re still finding a way to help them out.”
