Refugees relive the trauma they fled as ICE targets them in Minnesota

MINNEAPOLIS — Early one morning three weeks ago, before his kids were up, J.J. says ICE agents started knocking on his family’s front door.

His wife grabbed documents to show they and their four children are lawful refugees from Venezuela.

“They told me they just needed to verify the fingerprints for our oldest son, but he would not be detained,” he said. The family asked to use only their initials for fear of retaliation from Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

J.J. and his wife, A., didn’t understand why one child’s fingerprints would need checking, but they opened the door. And then they watched as their 20-year-old son was, in fact, arrested and driven away in a black SUV.

“When I saw him being handcuffed, I felt so scared,” A. said. “They were treating him like a delinquent. And they had guns with their fingers on the trigger.”

The Trump administration has repeatedly said its immigration crackdown in Minnesota targets the worst of the worst — “vicious, horrible criminals,” as the president put it recently. But more than 100 refugees with no criminal background have been unlawfully arrested, with many flown to a detention center in Texas, according to a class-action lawsuit filed by refugees and advocates for them. It’s part of a push the Department of Homeland Security announced Jan. 9 to re-examine thousands of refugee cases, starting in Minnesota, to investigate for potential fraud.

The focus is on those who arrived in the past few years and have not yet received a green card for legal permanent residency.

“The Trump administration will not stand idly by as the U.S. immigration system is weaponized by those seeking to defraud the American people,” the agency said in its announcement.

President Trump has dramatically cut refugee admissions to a record low, and in the last year admitted mostly white Afrikaners from South Africa. His administration also has stepped up allegations of public benefits fraud after a sweeping scandal in Minnesota that involved Somali-Americans who’d been refugees.

On Wednesday, a federal judge ordered the release of the refugees in Minnesota and granted a temporary pause in detentions, which he said had been made “without warrants or cause,” while the case plays out.

“At its best, America serves as a haven of individual liberties in a world too often full of tyranny and cruelty,” U.S. District Judge John Tunheim wrote in the order. “We abandon that ideal when we subject our neighbors to fear and chaos.”

Refugees are ‘probably the most vetted’ immigrants

Jane Graupman, executive director of the International Institute of Minnesota, which resettles refugees, said the way they’re being treated is “un-American.” 

“Refugees are probably the most vetted population that comes to the United States,” she said. “The FBI’s already checked them. The immigration services already checked them. They’ve had biometric screenings.”

Graupman said many of the refugees detained in Texas have also been released out into the streets there.”

“They have no money, no documents, no way to get home,” she said, adding that one man’s employer drove to Texas to bring him back to Minnesota.

The Department of Homeland Security did not answer NPR’s questions about why people have been sent to Texas, and whether agents have found evidence of wrongdoing. “Minnesota is ground zero for the war on fraud,” it said in a statement.

“It seems like what they’re actually doing is trying to find a way to revoke their refugee status,” said immigration attorney Luke Srodulski with the firm Aust Schmiechen. He represents a single mother sent first to Texas and then detained several more days back in Minnesota.

Srodulski said DHS is relying on an arcane statute that allows it to detain people with pending green card applications, but it’s not supposed to be used to search for fraud.

“I ultimately think the goal is cruelty,” he said. “And I think somebody pouring through the statutes came across this … and decided to make it a practice.”

While detained, his client did not have the diabetes medication she takes twice a day. At one point she was grilled for seven hours, essentially relitigating her entire refugee case. Srodulski called that highly unusual, and said if there were suspected fraud the questions would have been more narrowly focused. With no wrongdoing, she was approved for a green card and has been released.

“It’s very frustrating,” said Beth Grosen, whose Lutheran church sponsored Srodulski’s client when she arrived in the U.S. After the woman’s arrest, Grosen helped find a safe place for her son to live, and sent money for phone calls from Texas. The woman works at a daycare, and after her sudden disappearance no one knew when she’d be back.

“The parents of the children are heartbroken,” Grosen said. “There’s ripples throughout our community when crazy things like this happen.”

A familiar fear

Back at the Venezuelan family’s apartment, their son explained how he was detained for three days in Minnesota. The room was crowded and he had to sleep with his ankles shackled, anxious the whole time that he’d be deported.

“They didn’t tell me why I was arrested or why I was being released,” he said.

He wondered if it happened because he was stopped for driving too fast the day before his arrest. The officer saw his key chain and asked if he was from Venezuela.

“Minneapolis was beautiful. We expected a peaceful life here,” J.J. said, sitting next to his son and wife on the couch. But now their traumatic ordeal, and the whole immigration crackdown, reminds them of what they fled.

“In Venezuela, pro-government paramilitary groups act this way. They cover their faces, you can only see their eyes,” A. said. They kidnapped young men her son’s age and some never returned. Now, in the U.S., she said, “I relived that same fear.”