Since the launch of Operation Metro Surge, federal judges in Minnesota have repeatedly ruled — hundreds of times — that immigration agents illegally arrested and detained people and must release them.
Among them: a man from Ecuador who’s lived in the United States for more than 20 years and was arrested outside his suburban home without a warrant; a Colombian woman pursuing an asylum claim who was taken into custody without a warrant during a routine ICE check-in; a Mexican mother and her two children — ages 14 and 8 — who have complied with all orders regarding their immigration case since being permitted to enter the country in 2024.
Each case began with a habeas corpus petition, which is the legal term for challenging a person’s detention.
More than 1,000 such petitions have been filed in Minnesota’s federal courts since the start of Operation Metro Surge in December, according to a Reformer review of court records. In the 12 months prior, there were just 73 habeas corpus petitions filed in Minnesota.
Most of the petitions were filed by a newly mobilized army of volunteer lawyers with little or no experience with immigration law.
They are corporate litigators, divorce lawyers, estate planners and criminal defense attorneys who are leveraging their bar admission to mount an unprecedented defense of immigrants against the Trump administration’s efforts to achieve mass deportations through a new legal theory that rejects decades of precedent on who can be detained pending immigration proceedings.
It’s part of a massive resistance across the Twin Cities to Trump’s incursion of thousands of immigration agents — parents guarding schools during pick-up and drop-off, churches and businesses serving as pop-up distribution centers for food and other necessities, and scores of residents carrying groceries to people too afraid to leave their homes.
“All of us saw everybody lending a hand where they could, and this is something tangible that I could do,” said M Boulette, a family law attorney at Boulette PLLC. “I have a Federal Bar admission, and that’s not something that everybody has.”
Boulette typically handles divorces and had to learn how to file a habeas corpus petition. They filed their first on Jan. 27, and have since represented three dozen immigrants detained by federal agents.
Boulette got involved through the National Lawyers Guild, but there are other organizations working to connect immigrants with lawyers, too. Like the ICE patrols and food delivery efforts, the effort is decentralized and yet highly organized.
In the vast majority of cases, Boulette and their colleagues have won, with judges appointed by both Democratic and Republican presidents ordering their clients released or given bond hearings.
“The legal claims of the government are so weak that these are actually pretty straightforward arguments that we’re making,” said Claire Glenn, an attorney with the Climate Defense Project.
Glenn typically practices criminal defense law, representing activists who face prosecution for blocking pipeline construction or participating in other demonstrations. She filed her first habeas corpus petition in January, and has since filed nearly two dozen.
“We’re getting requests faster than we can file … That is the sad reality,” Glenn said.
Without representation, attorneys say detainees would still be stuck in overcrowded facilities. People detained in Minneapolis at the Whipple Federal Building report being shackled in overcrowded, mixed-gender cells without beds and little food. Detainees at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Texas reported seeing children vomiting after being served vegetables with mold and worms.
“They are languishing in indefinite detention, and they are being heavily, heavily pressured to sign voluntary deportation agreements,” Glenn said. “The cruelty is the point — to make people’s lives so miserable here that even though they have strong legal claims, they nonetheless give up on their life in America.”
Contrary to the Trump administration’s claim that immigration agents are targeting the “worst of the worst,” less than 14% of the 400,000 immigrants arrested during Trump’s first year back in office have been charged or convicted of a violent crime, according to an internal Department of Homeland Security document obtained by CBS News.
“Almost to a person … their criminal record looks like mine,” Boulette said. “They’ve got traffic tickets. Maybe they ran a stop sign once. Maybe they don’t have anything.”
The Trump administration’s policy is to treat all immigrants without legal status as if they were just detained at the border, making them subject to warrantless arrest and mandatory detention pending immigration proceedings no matter how long they’ve lived in the country or if they have open asylum claims or visa applications.
For three decades, immigrants already in the country, often with employment authorization, families and other ties to the country, have been eligible to be released on bond pending immigration proceedings.
Hundreds of federal judges — including Trump appointees — are using that interpretation to rule that immigrants have been unlawfully detained and should be released. In 4,400 cases since October, federal judges across the country have ruled that federal agents have detained immigrants illegally, according to a Reuters analysis.
The number of habeas petitions has overwhelmed the federal courts, in Minnesota and across the country, with judges becoming increasingly impatient with the Trump administration’s mandatory detention policy for undocumented people.
“As this court has explained on multiple occasions, (the federal government’s) interpretation of (the law) contradicts the plain language of the statute,” Judge Donovan Frank wrote in an order for the release of a Mexican man with a valid work permit who has lived in the United States since 1995. He was arrested on his way to work and then sent to a facility in Texas.
The volume of cases has also burned out federal attorneys tasked with defending the Trump administration. The U.S. Attorney’s Office has had to redirect its shrinking number of attorneys away from prosecuting serious crimes to respond to the habeas corpus petitions in defense of the Trump administration.
Federal prosecutors have sought to explain a spate of ignored court orders by saying they are under extraordinary strain.
Judge Jerry Blackwell rebuked them during a Feb. 3 hearing: “If the government undertakes an enforcement operation of this scale, one that results in the detention of large numbers of people, including individuals who are lawfully present in the United States, then the government assumes a corresponding obligation to ensure that each detention complies with the Constitution and with court orders governing release.”
He added: “The volume of cases and matters is not a justification for diluting constitutional rights and it never can be.”
Julie Le, representing the Trump administration, told Blackwell at that hearing she was brought on from ICE to help the U.S. Attorney’s Office less than a month earlier. She received no training or orientation on how to do the job and was still having trouble accessing her Department of Justice email.
Le said she would write emails in “big, bold font” and threaten to quit to get ICE to follow court orders, but stayed on because there was no one to replace her, and she wanted to make sure the agency understood the importance of complying with court orders.
“Sometime I wish you would just hold me in contempt, Your Honor, so that I can have a full 24 hours of sleep,” Le told Blackwell. “The system sucks. This job sucks. And I am trying every breath that I have so that I can get you what you need.”
Le was removed from U.S. Attorney’s Office shortly after that hearing.
In addition to ignoring court orders, federal immigration agents have responded to the coordinated efforts of lawyers to file habeas corpus petitions by swiftly transferring detainees to Texas or New Mexico.
In many cases, attorneys have told the court they don’t even know where their clients are. Glenn said she’s been unable to establish a line of communication to her clients who have been transferred to detention centers out of state.
Liam Conejo Ramos, the 5-year-old boy in a blue bunny hat detained coming home from school in Columbia Heights, was sent to a detention center in Texas and a judge there ordered them returned to Minnesota in a now-famous, scathing rebuke of the Trump administration’s “ill-conceived and incompetently-implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children.”
Frank, the federal judge, wrote that he’s seen a “pattern of obfuscation,” in which ICE is “attempting to hide the location of detainees, and thus, make habeas proceedings more difficult.”
Moving detainees south may give federal prosecutors an advantage of having the habeas corpus cases heard by judges more sympathetic to the Trump administration’s policy of mandatory detainment.
The ultra-conservative 5th Circuit Court of Appeals— which covers Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi — recently sided with the Trump administration, ruling immigrants can be held in mandatory detention no matter where they’re arrested or how long they’ve lived in the country. The issue is also before the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals, and the question could likely end up before the U.S. Supreme Court.
That’s put pressure on attorneys to file habeas petitions as quickly as possible to lock in jurisdiction in Minnesota.
Federal judges have in some cases decided that Minnesota continues to have jurisdiction in cases even after the person was moved out of the state, if their attorney didn’t know their whereabouts. And attorneys in the 5th Circuit may successfully challenge immigrants’ detention through other legal arguments.
While Minnesota attorneys have mounted a successful defense against illegal detainment and freed hundreds of people, the Trump administration has made significant progress toward its goal of mass deportations through Operation Metro Surge.
Some immigrants detained had no previous contact with immigration enforcement, and so even if their arrests were ruled illegal, they are nevertheless in proceedings that may ultimately lead to their deportation.
And the volunteer army of divorce attorneys and patent lawyers don’t have the specialized knowledge to represent them in that next phase of their case.
“One of the really hard things about this work is explaining to families … that my ability to help is limited. I can get you out of confinement, but I won’t be able to solve the more permanent problem of making sure you can stay here safely,” Boulette said.
Their cases must then be picked up by immigration attorneys like Solomon Steen, who said there has simply never been enough immigration lawyers to keep up — even before Operation Metro Surge.
“We’ve just been completely overwhelmed by this new wave of illegal conduct by the administration,” Steen said. “There are going to be a lot of people who are just not represented — period.”
Minnesota Reformer is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Minnesota Reformer maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor J. Patrick Coolican for questions: info@minnesotareformer.com.
