Kamal was hopeful that his summons in April for an interview at a Minneapolis immigration office wouldn’t be an issue.
A refugee from Ethiopia, Kamal entered the United States legally in 2022. He’d gone through an extensive vetting process and around ten different interviews with refugee agencies and immigration officers, proving his case over nearly a decade. Still, he had reason for concern.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) had sent two notices to a mailbox Kamal rarely checks. By the time he found them, he’d already missed his interview.
“I knew that I was here legally,” said Kamal, who is not being identified by his legal name because he fears retaliation for speaking about his case. “But I had no idea why they called me and what they would ask.”
Kamal immediately went to the office to try and rectify the situation, hoping it could be resolved quickly. Agents at the office instructed him to go home and said they’d be in touch soon.
Shortly after, Kamal received another letter from USCIS. They were terminating his refugee status, meaning he could face deportation.
Across the Twin Cities, attorneys and legal organizations say refugees have been receiving Notices of Intent to Terminate Refugee Status (NOITs) as a continuation of Operation PARRIS, a federal operation claiming to target fraud among legal refugees in the state. These notices have largely funneled refugees into the asylum system, which is burdened by severe backlogs and where refugees face increasingly difficult chances of being granted asylum.
For refugees in Minnesota who have fled persecution, the federal government’s latest crackdown is another challenge to overcome.
“I’m very stressed,” Kamal said. “I don’t sleep.”
Operation PARRIS’s Next Act
In January, the Department of Homeland Security announced Operation PARRIS. In the weeks that followed, federal immigration officials began detaining refugees appearing in person for interviews and promptly transferring them to detention centers in Texas.
Several court rulings in late January and February halted detentions from the operation, but re-vetting interviews for refugees across Minnesota continued in the months following. Refugees often received no more than 48 hours of notice for interviews, which lasted up to eight hours and discussed their original applications in extreme detail.
These interviews were not conducted to examine specific claims, but rather, to catch discrepancies between refugees’ new interviews and interviews they gave years earlier when they originally filed for refugee status, according to Laurie Ball Cooper, vice president for U.S. Legal Programs at International Refugee Assistance Project.
“They were absolutely a fishing expedition,” she said.
Immigrants seeking refugee status are highly vetted before entering the United States. The government assesses their identities and determines whether they pose a security threat. The government also evaluates whether they’ve experienced persecution or have a “well-founded” fear of persecution because of their race, religion, nationality, political opinion or affiliation with a particular social group.
Refugees who are admitted into the United States receive initial financial assistance for resettlement, are authorized to work and have a legal pathway to permanent residency.
Ball Cooper said interviews peaked in February and March before abruptly coming to a halt. Weeks later, USCIS began sending out the refugee termination notices from an office in Georgia tasked with conducting a computer-based review of refugee cases. The written notices outline the government’s intent to terminate someone’s refugee status, and affords them a window of time to provide evidence for why their status should not be revoked.
As was the case with Kamal, Ball Cooper said many of the notices did not reach recipients.
“They were delivered in strange ways,” she said. “Many were hand delivered to landlord offices; there were a lot of missed notices.”
Refugees receiving the notices had previously been given 30 days to respond and provide evidence to support retaining their status. However, a new interim rule posted by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security on Wednesday shortened the window to 10 days, citing the need to “mitigate risks to national security” and “prevent fraud and exploitation.”
The new rule makes it impossible to respond to the notices in time, said Rachel Kohler, supervising attorney at the International Institute of Minnesota, a nonprofit that supports new immigrants in the state.
Kohler said attorneys frequently need to file a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the U.S. government before submitting a response to the termination notice. FOIA requests provide attorneys with a copy of a client’s original interviews being scrutinized by USCIS and allow them to address specific claims levied by the agency.
With the new 10-day timeline, Kohler said requests will not arrive in time.
USCIS Spokesman Zach Kahler said in a statement to Sahan Journal that the rule is an attempt to accelerate terminations of refugee status.
“U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has found an alarming erosion of screening and vetting measures under the Biden Administration,” the statement read. “This interim final rule ensures that when DHS determines an alien did not meet the definition of a refugee at the time of admission, USCIS can now move promptly and efficiently to terminate that status.”
Kohler said FOIA requests have returned interviews that are heavily redacted by the government, leaving out key information material to USCIS’ decision to terminate an individual’s status. That means that for attorneys responding to the termination notices, there is limited recourse to address claims the government made in the notices to justify terminating a client’s status.
“It’s USCIS’s explanation of what happened at these various interviews, but we can’t see what actually happened because we can’t see the materials ourselves,” Kohler said.
Are you credible?
Attorneys and advocates say the notices have offered frivolous reasons for terminating refugee status. USCIS has based terminations on a review of refugees’ “credibility,” a highly subjective process, attorneys said.
“When they’re making these credibility determinations, it’s totally and completely discretionary whether or not an officer finds a client to be credible or not,” Koehler said. “And so our ability to request a waiver of that or to respond to that is really limited.”
Reasons for terminating status have been wide ranging, hinging primarily on differences between refugees’ interviews during their original application process or their new interviews under Operation PARRIS. In some instances, failure to provide information alone has been sufficient.
“In one of our cases, they brought up the fact that, ‘In this interview, you talked about this arrest, but in this interview, you didn’t,’” Koehler said. “So it’s not even providing different information, it’s just you didn’t tell us about this one in the second interview and you did in the first.”
Attorneys say that social media reviews have also been used as justification for deeming a refugee as not credible. Minneapolis immigration attorney Luke Srodulski said one of his clients received a termination notice that cited multiple social media posts as evidence that their risk of persecution in their home country was not well-founded.
“USCIS listed off social media posts from both before and after he was granted refugee status and used that to say, ‘Oh, you actually supported these people that you said were involved in your persecution,’” Srodulski said.
Srodulski added that the social media posts were largely reposts, and not actual opinions expressed by his client.
The scale of refugee status terminations is unclear, though Ball Cooper said the International Refugee Assistance Project has yet to see large numbers of notices outside of Minnesota.
Danielle Hendrickson, managing attorney at Mid-Minnesota Legal Aid, believes that hundreds of refugees in Minnesota are potentially affected by the notices. Hendrickson said her organization has seen subjective criteria and discrepancies between interviews used to determine whether a refugee’s fear of persecution is credible.
“They are trying to find really minute details that are different in an interview that happened 10 years ago,” Hendrickson said. “And what I have seen is that they may actually have nothing to do with the refugee claim.
“Whether there was misrepresentation in some of the cases I have seen doesn’t actually get at whether somebody was a refugee and continues to be a refugee.”
Ball Cooper and Hendrickson said the highly discretionary reviews also raise legal concerns around admissibility — an immigrant’s right to enter the country or obtain lawful permanent residence. Refugees entering the United States are extensively vetted, participating in several admission interviews and screenings from multiple government agencies. The termination notices are retroactively changing this process, Ball Cooper said.
“Often somebody at a desk in Georgia is re-evaluating the credibility of the refugee based on only information that was available at the time of the original decision,” Ball Cooper said. “[They are] overriding the decision of a specially trained refugee officer.”
New country, new challenges
Kamal left Ethiopia in 2000, fleeing political turmoil that gripped the country in violence.
Fearing further persecution, he crossed into neighboring Kenya with his family, staying at the Kakoma Refugee Camp before moving to Nairobi. As retribution for his father’s political affiliations, he spent multiple spells in prison in Ethiopia, enduring nearly two years of torture at different military camps run by the ruling Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front. Only after soldiers from the opposing Oromo Liberation Front raided the camp he was being held at in 1997 was he able to escape.
Kamal worked several jobs in Nairobi, including as a tailor and taxi driver. After years of interviews with resettlement agencies and immigration officers, he was granted admission to the United States as a refugee in 2022. Kamal resettled in Minnesota, working as a patient care assistant and driver to send money back to his children in Kenya.
After having his refugee status terminated in June, however, Kamal is now in removal proceedings in Fort Snelling Immigration Court, meaning the U.S. government is actively trying to deport him.
“I’m frustrated,” he said. “I have no idea what will happen.”
USCIS alleged that Kamal had made inconsistent statements across his interviews, determining that he had “not met his burden of establishing credibility.” Kamal vehemently denies USCIS’s allegations, saying his statements have not changed since his early interviews in Kenya.
“They are the ones actually twisted,” he said. “My statement was consistent and that’s how I came here.”
At the heart of USCIS’s allegations against Kamal are statements he gave about his role in a payment made to an individual associated with the Oromo Liberation Front. USCIS classified the group as a Tier III terrorist organization, and said the alleged inconsistencies in Kamal’s statement excluded him from refugee status when he entered the United States.
Tier III terrorist organizations are the lowest level of classified terrorist threat, do not require any official organization and fall under a broad definition of activity. Unlike Tier I and II terrorist organizations, Tier III terrorist groups are not on any official government list, and their determination is made on a case-by-case basis by immigration officers and judges.
Kamal denies sending any money to the individual in question, and maintains his statements have been consistent across interviews.
He’s now in immigration removal proceedings at Fort Snelling, where respondents face increasingly tight odds of success. He says returning to Ethiopia could be a death sentence.
“I could be disappeared at the airport,” he said.
Expanding Operation PARRIS
While cases targeting refugees have thus far been concentrated in Minnesota, several legal documents and policy memos have pointed to the Trump administration’s desire to expand operations.
In February, International Refugee Assistance Project filed a lawsuit against the administration, asking a judge to put a stop to Operation PARRIS-style detentions nationwide. A court ruling in March granted a temporary pause on detentions, but the case remains in litigation and awaits a permanent decision.
The government still wants to remove refugees from across the country, Ball Cooper said.
“They have not abandoned their desire to terrorize refugees nationwide with this,” Ball Cooper said. “They just cannot currently pursue it because of the court order.”
At the International Institute of Minnesota, Kohler said the wave of refugee terminations has unfairly targeted people who have already undergone extensive vetting prior to coming to the United States.
“They’ve done everything correctly,” Kohler said. “They have passed all of the tests and all of the vetting procedures both overseas and in the United States.”
Kamal is one of them. Today, with his future in the country hanging in the balance, he feels perpetually at risk. He said he limits his time away from home for fear of being detained by immigration authorities, and feels many of the same concerns that drove him to leave Ethiopia over 25 years ago.
“That’s why I left my home country,” he said. “If I had peace there, I wouldn’t have left. Now I am going through all this.”
