The Karen mother of two had been in the U.S. for three years and was on track to get her green card when she was called in by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) for a fresh interview.
The stakes were high: being separated from her two kids – one of whom was born here – and sent back to Myanmar, a country she had never lived in. She had a day to prepare.
During her early April interview, she grew visibly nervous and at times broke down as questions turned to the abuse and threats she experienced before emigrating from Thailand, said her interpreter, Zaw, who requested a pseudonym for his own and his clients’ safety.
“She was asked, ‘Have you lived in Burma before? Why don’t you go back to Burma right now? If you go back to Burma right now, will bad things happen to you?’ etc. A lot of questions about Burma, even though she’s never been there. She’s been in Thailand all her life, and then moved to the United States,” Zaw said.
He had just 20 minutes’ notice to accompany her to the interview, which lasted almost three hours.
Her interview was part of Operation PARRIS, a program launched in early January that targeted 5,600 refugees in Minnesota on a path to permanent residency for additional interviews and scrutiny. Many of those targeted were part of Minnesota’s Karen community, an ethnic minority group from Myanmar. Local attorneys say refugees from Afghanistan, Sudan, Ecuador, Eritrea, and Somalia also received interview notices.
A court challenge put the program on hold in late February. The Minnesota case was later dismissed because of a parallel case in Massachusetts challenging detention of refugees who have not received their green cards after a year in the U.S. But that has left many refugees who received the reinterview notices unsure how to proceed.
Local immigration attorneys and refugee organizations across the Twin Cities and in St. Cloud told Sahan Journal they are now seeing interview notices being cancelled or rescheduled. Refugees who have appeared for interviews have yet to receive a decision. Clients are left with little time to prepare for the interviews and many are in limbo over the future of their cases.
“The cancellations caused a lot of distress,” said Alice Buckner, executive director of the Karen Organization of Minnesota. “People didn’t know, ‘should I try to go to my appointment, or not? And how do I call and find out if my appointment is still happening? And if I don’t go, will I be penalized?’”
Grueling interviews, little time to prepare
Since the notices for interviews started going out in January, Zaw has been receiving calls from legal firms, community organizations and faith leaders. Having worked as an interpreter on asylum cases, green card applicants and citizenship interviews, he is aware of the standard interview processes. But the PARRIS interviews have been unlike anything he has experienced.
With some interviews running as long as five hours with few or no breaks, he said that people have been nervous and confused about the process. Some get less than 24 hours’ notice to prepare for extensive questioning that includes general background questions, why they fled their country of origin, their reasons for seeking refuge, terrorism or fraud-related questions, as well as questions over whether their fear of remaining in their home country was justified.
U.S. Rep. Betty McCollum, D-Minn., who represents Ramsey County where the Karen community is largely concentrated, told Sahan Journal in a statement that Operation PARRIS has “unjustly targeted Karen Minnesotans, causing deep distress for thousands of Karen refugees, asylees, and TPS recipients who legally entered the U.S., and followed the rules and underwent a thorough vetting process.”
McCollum, who is also the co-chair of the Congressional Burma Caucus, added that “it is not safe for members of Minnesota’s Karen community to return to Burma,” and pointed that the State Department classifies Burma, also known as Myanmar, as Level 4 (Do Not Travel) due to “widespread extrajudicial killings, torture, and unjust detention of dissidents by the military junta.”
Buckner said that her organization, which also serves communities other than just Karen, noticed mostly refugees from the Karen community being called in for revetting interviews. The community, she said, was also subjected to home visits by USCIS.
The operation, according to USCIS, aimed to counter fraud, terrorism and public safety threats with interviews, background checks, and merit reviews.
“Minnesota is ground zero for the war on fraud. The Trump administration will not stand idly by as the U.S. immigration system is weaponized by those seeking to defraud the American people,” USCIS spokesman Matthew J. Tragesser told Sahan Journal in an April 9 statement.
USCIS did not respond to Sahan Journal’s request for data on how many interviews have been scheduled as of April 8, the outcome of the interviews, how they differ from the initial vetting interviews refugees have to go through, or the reason behind the recent cancellations.
Legal pushback
During the height of Operation PARRIS, as many as 150 refugees were arrested from across the state, and in many cases, flown to Texas, despite having pending green card applications.
Within weeks, refugees filed a class-action lawsuit in federal court, arguing that the operation violated constitutional protections, including due process and safeguards against unlawful search and seizure. By late January, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order, followed by a preliminary injunction and an extension to put a halt on the arrests, finding the operation likely unlawful and inconsistent with the Refugee Act of 1980. The case was recently dismissed unilaterally and the preliminary injunction was vacated.
The case was dismissed because an ongoing lawsuit filed in Massachusetts that challenges the detention of refugees would apply to refugees in Minnesota as well. “If the government does restart detentions here, we’re standing by to sue them again,” John Albanese, an attorney with Berger Montague representing the petitioners, said.
These rulings have largely frozen arrests and detentions under Operation PARRIS, but attorneys and advocates say people were still being served notices to appear for revetting while some await decisions. They say that not only does this complicate an already complicated immigration system but also furthers the Trump administration’s crackdown on legal immigration.
“We have staff who have been here for over 30 years, and they’ve just never seen anything like this before,” said Lou Her, the immigration supervisor at Southern Minnesota Regional Legal Services. “At this point, we’re not exactly sure what the next steps are.”
USCIS said in the statement that it is “implementing longstanding law as Congress intended by requiring aliens admitted as refugees to be fully re-vetted after a year. This is not novel or discretionary; it is a clear requirement upheld by the courts for years.”
Lawyers refute this claim.
“They’re taking liberty with that statement,” said Yasin Alsaidi, deputy director of Mid-Minnesota Legal Aid. He explained that refugees have to have lived in the country for a year before they can be eligible to change their status to lawful permanent residence through an application process which involves vetting their activities in the past year. This allows DHS to follow up on cases after one year and is not, by itself, a sufficient basis for detaining a refugee. “Now, they’re thinking that this process is to revet all of their refugee status; that is new,” he said.
Her said that her clients started receiving notices for the interviews in mid-January. Then, the interviews scheduled for late March and early April started getting cancelled, even as new interviews for late April are still being scheduled.
“We’re hoping that they get rescheduled, because otherwise, we’re hearing that they may just be sending out notices of intent to terminate as a default. So we’re just waiting and monitoring the issue, because everything is developing in real time,” she said.
In St. Cloud, Alsaidi noticed a similar trend where his clients, too, are being told that their interviews have been cancelled for the day and will be rescheduled in the future. Alsaidi, like all the attorneys Sahan Journal spoke to, does not know the reason behind the cancellations and why the clients who appeared for interviews have not heard back on a decision yet.
“How do we advise our clients when we don’t know what’s going on, when these things are coming at us haphazardly, and when there is no clarity in the process, not just the law,” he said.
Even the manner in which these notices were served initially was informal and haphazard.
“When they first started the PARRIS interviews, it was within 24 to 48 hours. That’s when it was a form that was handwritten and was provided to the clients without any signatures or anything,” Alsaidi said. “A couple of weeks after that, they kind of got their act together, and they were given interviews [within] about a week or so, and that seems to be continuous, until they started canceling more recently in the last couple of weeks,” he said in early April.”
Revisiting a traumatic journey
Advocates and attorneys say that preparing their clients and finding legal consultation and interpreters has been a challenge. For Her, when she does get to prepare her clients prior to the interviews, “it’s like hours of preparation for questions that they were probably asked back [in their home countries], and they may not remember.”
Refugees are admitted into the U.S. under a formal process involving extensive screening and vetting with multiple U.S. and international agencies, which often takes years. The refugee review process entails an internal and administrative process of reexamining original documentation submitted by refugees to ensure they meet the relevant legal criteria for admission and resettlement.
“A lot of times our clients don’t have the original refugee documents anymore, or they have mental health [issues] and don’t remember what was said at the interview,” Her said. “The refugee process is also just such a confusing process that oftentimes they don’t understand how they even got here by the grace of God.”
She said officers will often ask questions about her clients’ need to seek refuge in multiple different ways to catch them if they change their answers, or if their answers are inconsistent. “It’s so challenging because a lot of our refugee clients who enter the U.S. have experienced trauma. If their answers are inconsistent, it’s not because they’re committing fraud, it’s because they may not remember because it was a traumatic time.”
Zaw said that he would see this translate in his clients as they sat nervously, doing their best to answer correctly, often breaking down in the process of recalling their journey of fleeing and arriving in the United States.
Many Karen refugees have fled persecution, abuse, as well as the ongoing civil war in Myanmar. Last year, the Department of Homeland Security revoked Temporary Protected States (TPS) for immigrants from Myanmar, leaving roughly 1,200 Minnesota residents at risk of deportation. Most people from Myanmar in Minnesota are from the Karen ethnic group, a minority population in Myanmar who could face violence and persecution in their home country. TPS for Myanmar formally expired on Jan. 26 of this year.
Zaw said that officers don’t often know about the civil war and the conditions Karen refugees have fled, and he often has to provide cultural and historical context to his clients’ answers.
He said that officers are often condescending, lose patience, and lack a respectful tone, making the interviewees even more nervous. “[They] might not understand the questions, so the officer will ask in a different way, and sometimes in 10 to 30 different ways. It can be nerve-wracking. I have seen people cry,” he said.
For Zaw, who was born in a refugee camp outside of Myanmar and immigrated to the United States over 15 years ago, this work is personal. “I understand refugees’ experiences,” he said. “This is my way of supporting my community, my people. [My clients] are very grateful they have somebody to go in with [them].”
When the mother of two was asked about her Karen heritage, she not only explained to the officer, but also invited him to Karen New Year to experience her culture. Zaw said that that pride is inherent to the Karen identity.
“Our strength is adaptability. There’s nothing we cannot do. But our immigration system can do better [by being] considerate of peoples’ experiences and their lives.”
