Demonstrators gather outside of the Henry Whipple Federal Building, shouting at federal vehicles and recording their plates Saturday, Jan. 17, 2026. (Photo by Nicole Neri/Minnesota Reformer)

A Minneapolis-based human rights group is suing the Department of Homeland Security, accusing DHS officials and agents of illegally and systematically preventing detained immigrants from meeting with their lawyers.

The proposed class action lawsuit, filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court of Minnesota, was brought on behalf of the Advocates for Human Rights and a St. Paul woman referred to by the initials “L.H.M.”

According to the complaint, L.H.M., who has lived in Minnesota since 2019 and has a pending asylum claim, was arrested Monday after a routine check-in at ICE’s Office of Intensive Supervision in Bloomington.

After L.H.M.’s family contacted her attorney, the lawyer immediately travelled to the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building but was unilaterally refused access to L.H.M.

L.H.M. recently underwent cranial surgery, the lawsuit states, and “has significant medical needs that may be severely adversely affected by detention conditions or involuntary transfer out of state.”

According to the claim, federal agents at the Whipple Building — and at least one ICE attorney — have repeatedly told frustrated lawyers that “no visitation between detainees and attorneys is or has ever been permitted at Whipple.”

“This is false,” the complaint continues. “Whipple has rooms labeled ‘ERO Visitation,’ where attorneys have met with clients held at Whipple for years.”

Nowadays, when lawyers attempt to arrange visits at Whipple, phone calls and emails allegedly go unanswered.

According to the suit, one lawyer was recently threatened with arrest at the Whipple Building, despite having received prior permission from agency officials. Another attorney attempting to speak to a client was “confronted by six armed security personnel, one of whom said, ‘We’re not having a debate here, turn your car around and get the hell out of here.’”

The lawsuit asserts claims under the First Amendment, the Fifth Amendment, the Administrative Procedures Act and the Immigration and Nationality Act. 

A spokesperson for Homeland Security responded: “Any allegations people detained by ICE do not have access to attorneys are false. Illegal aliens in the Whipple Federal Building have access to phones they can use to contact their families and lawyers. Additionally, ICE gives all illegal aliens arrested a court-approved list of free or low-cost attorneys. All detainees receive full due process.”

(Homeland Security has a burgeoning record of providing false information to the public, as detailed in a recent Stateline story; after the recent killing of Alex Pretti by Border Patrol, a Homeland Security spokesperson claimed Pretti “wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement” even though he never drew his gun, for which he had a permit.)

This is not the first time DHS has been sued for impeding detainees’ access to counsel. Similar suits in New York and Illinois have resulted in court orders.

DHS also has a recent history of defying court orders.

On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Patrick Schiltz, chief judge of the Minnesota district, issued an order in a habeas petition in which he identified 96 court orders that ICE has violated since January 1 – a tally that he said is likely an undercount because it was assembled in haste.

“This list should give pause to anyone — no matter his or her political beliefs — who cares about the rule of law,” wrote Schiltz, who was appointed to the bench by George W. Bush and clerked for Antonin Scalia, the late Supreme Court justice and conservative icon.

“ICE has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence,” Schiltz wrote.

An Avelo Airlines jet that has been painted all white and is used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Air Operations at Mesa Gateway Airport for deportation and detainee transfers. Photo by Jerod MacDonald-Evoy/Arizona Mirror

Two gay Iranian men who came to the United States seeking asylum and who were set to be deported on Sunday to Iran, where homosexuality has been punished by death, had their deportations delayed. 

While the two men were not deported on Sunday, an unknown number of other Iranians were, as immigration watchdogs and journalists noted that a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement chartered aircraft that departed from Phoenix Mesa Gateway Airport made its way to the country.  

Rebekah Wolf, an attorney for the American Immigration Council, which is representing the two men, confirmed to the Arizona Mirror that one of the men was able to obtain a temporary stay of removal from late Friday from the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. 

Wolf declined to publicly identify her clients out of fear for their safety, but the Mirror has reviewed court documents and detention records that confirm key details of their story. 

The other man, who is medically fragile, had his deportation delayed because he is under a medical quarantine due to a measles outbreak at the ICE Florence Detention Facility he is currently detained at, Wolf said. ICE, the Arizona Department of Health Services and the Pinal County Health Department all refused to comment on the outbreak. 

Wolf’s clients, who have no criminal convictions and who both came to the United States in 2025 on asylum claims, were arrested by the Iranian “morality police” for being gay years ago. That spurred them to flee the country. 

Homosexuality is a crime in Iran and the country has executed men for it as recently as 2022. 

“Our position has been that, if we can get a court, any court, any judge to fully consider all of the evidence in the case, that a grant of asylum is obvious,” Wolf said. “These are very straightforward cases.”

Wolf’s clients were denied asylum in spring 2025 and have been working on appealing that denial, but were not granted stays of removal. She said that when her clients initially went before the court, they did not have legal representation, leading to the court and judge not seeing all the evidence for their case. 

“The reason that we are in this position is because these clients, while they have very straightforward asylum claims, did not have representation,” Wolf said.

While the temporary stay will help her one client, it does not halt deportation for the entirety of the appeal process. 

Between 3,000 and 4,500 Iranians were recently killed when their government brutally cracked down on protesters. The unrest led to the Federal Aviation Administration issuing a no-fly zone over the region as tensions between Iran and the United States escalated. 

ICE did not respond to a request for comment about what agreement it had made to allow its deportation aircraft to fly into Iran and what agreement it may have come to with the country allowing it to conduct the deportation. 

Wolf also said that she has been in communication with members of Congress who have taken interest in the case, which has led to some interesting revelations. 

“Up until Sunday morning, the last we had heard was that there was not going to be a flight on Sunday,” Wolf said, of information she and members of Congress had been told. “The lack of communication or transparency between DHS and Congress is pretty telling about the sort of state of things.” 

U.S. Rep. Yassamin Ansari, a Phoenix Democrat, has been outspoken about the deportations to Iran, asking the ICE and DHS to clarify what arrangements the United States has made to conduct the deportations back to Iran. 

The Mesa Gateway Airport that the two men are scheduled to fly out of plays a crucial role in ICE’s ramping up of aerial deportation efforts. It hosts the agency’s headquarters for its “ICE Air” operations, which uses subcontractors and subleases to disguise deportation aircraft.

The airport has also been part of the administration’s efforts to send immigrants to African nations like Ghana, often when those aboard are not even from the continent. 

The airport is also home to a lesser-known detention facility. 

The Arizona Removal Operations Coordination Center, or AROCC for short, is a 25,000-square-foot facility at the airport. It opened in 2010 to little fanfare and can house up to 157 detainees and 79 employees from ICE, according to an ICE press release from 2010.

At least 40 immigrants ICE arrested in Minneapolis in recent weeks are being detained at the Torrance County Detention Facility in Estancia, three detainees told Source New Mexico. (Patrick Lohmann/Source NM)

Dozens of immigrants currently housed at a New Mexico detention facility arrived there recently from the Minneapolis area, the site of a massive federal immigration operation and intensifying protests.

Three detainees at the Torrance County Detention Facility in Estancia told Source New Mexico in phone interviews Wednesday evening that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrested them separately in Minnesota on or around Jan. 5 before quickly flying them to a detention facility in El Paso, which was rapidly filling with new arrestees as they stayed there for several days. 

On Jan. 11, officers woke them up around 4 a.m. and bussed about 40 of them to Estancia, a journey that required detainees to be awake for 24 hours, detainee Jorge Cordoba told Source. Everyone on the bus to Estancia was arrested in Minneapolis or nearby, he said. 

Cordoba, 33, said he has lived in Minneapolis for more than 20 years and lives in the United States legally under protected Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival status granted to immigrants who arrived here as children. His parents brought him here from Mexico when he was 10, he said. 

“My wife is a U.S. citizen. I have four kids,” he said. “I’ve been a pretty good citizen. It’s been more than 10 years since I got a speeding ticket.”

Cordoba’s protected status didn’t stop an ICE agent from arresting him around 4:30 a.m. Jan. 5 on his way to work at a humidity control company, he said. ICE agents took him to a temporary detention facility in the city and, by 10 p.m. that night, Cordoba was already in El Paso, he said. 

While Source could not independently corroborate his account, Innovation Law Lab, an immigrant legal advocacy group, provided details of its own interviews with recent jail arrivals, including one account that matches Cordoba’s. 

Now Cordoba remains in New Mexico awaiting a hearing before a judge to demonstrate that he still has DACA status.

“I’m stuck here,” he said. 

Irina Vaynerman, a Minnesota-based lawyer with the organization Groundwork Legal, told Source on Thursday that ICE is deliberately shipping detainees to far-away facilities to deprive them of legal access and family support. 

Her organization is seeking a federal judge’s order to return one of her clients from New Mexico. In a legal filing Wednesday, she argued that “Oscar O.T.”, a Guatemalan man seeking asylum, is being denied constitutional due process and that his transfer to New Mexico violates a judicial order that he be able to face a judge in Minnesota. 

“This is just part of a much bigger story about not just the unlawful detentions that are happening, but on top of that, the intentional evading of the court’s orders and court’s jurisdiction,” she said.

She said ICE shipping detainees out-of-state prevents “individuals who have been unlawfully detained from being able to connect with local counsel and file the legal actions they need to be able to get free.”

In Oscar’s case, she said, ICE’s system for lawyers to track their clients was not working, so they had no clue where he was until she got an email from ICE saying he was being held in “Albuquerque.” 

No ICE detention facility exists in Albuquerque, so Vayneman said it’s possible he is actually in Estancia, an hour or so away from Albuquerque, and was bussed there along with fellow Minneapolis residents from El Paso. 

“That is the type of insanity that is going on, the intentional disappearing of Minnesotans who have been unlawfully detained,” she said. “It is genuinely the government’s effort to try to erase entire swaths of the U.S. population in an unlawful way.”

An ICE spokesperson did not respond to Source’s request for comment about why the agency would hold Minneapolis arrestees in Estancia. A spokesperson for CoreCivic, which owns and operates the facility, referred Source’s request for comment to ICE.

It’s not clear exactly how many Minneapolis arrestees are held in Estancia. Tiffany Wang, a lawyer with Innovation Law Lab, told Source on Wednesday that a “decent number” of roughly 100 detainees the group spoke with last week were from Minnesota. The Portland-based immigrant legal advocacy group does weekly jail visits. 

Wang said her best guess as to why ICE would select Estancia is that the jail has space, following a reduction in detainees that coincided with a two-month-long contract expiration between ICE and CoreCivic late last year. She noted that many detainees previously arrived there from a makeshift ICE facility in the Florida Everglades known as “Alligator Alcatraz.”

“TCDF just has served as this holding place for people caught in other states, and sent here with really no regard to the family that they have in other places or with the attorneys that they may have in their home states, or anything,” she said.

The Legislature is currently considering a ban on public entities like Torrance County from contracting with ICE and CoreCivic for the purpose of immigrant detention. One reason lawmakers cite is to prevent public bodies from being complicit in President Donald Trump’s mass deportation push in New Mexico and across the country. 

A New Mexico House committee is scheduled to take up the bill Thursday afternoon.

Cordoba, along with fellow Estancia detainees Cirilo Figueroa and Felix Garcia, all told Source they worry most about their families more than 1,200 miles away in Minnesota amid protests and an immigration crackdown that have seized the city. Like Cordoba, Garcia and Figueroa said they’ve lived in the city more than 20 years. Garcia, 59, has 12 grandchildren, as well as a nephew whom ICE briefly detained despite him being a US citizen, he said. 

All have watched local news reports from inside the jail showing the chaos in their hometown, they said, and described feeling powerless to help their families from so far away. 

“It’s not fair,” Cordoba said, his voice cracking, “what’s happening.”