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.

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.”

U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., left, and Rep. Angie Craig, D-Minn., arrive at the regional ICE headquarters at the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building on Jan. 10, 2026 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The lawmakers attempted to access the facility where the Department of Homeland Security has been headquartering operations in the state. (Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — A dozen Democratic members of Congress Monday asked a federal judge for an emergency hearing, arguing the Department of Homeland Security violated a court order when Minnesota lawmakers were denied access to conduct oversight into facilities that hold immigrants.

The oversight visits to Minneapolis ICE facilities followed the deadly shooting of 37-year-old Renee Good by federal immigration officer Jonathan Ross. Federal immigration officers have intensified immigration enforcement in the Twin Cities following the shooting, leading to massive protests there and across the country. 

“On Saturday, January 9—three days after U.S. citizen Renee Good was shot dead by an ICE agent in Minneapolis—three members of Congress from the Minnesota delegation, with this Court’s order in hand, attempted to conduct an oversight visit of an ICE facility near Minneapolis,” according to Monday’s filing in the District Court for the District of Columbia. 

Democratic U.S. Reps. Ilhan Omar, Angie Craig and Kelly Morrison of Minnesota said they were denied entry to the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building shortly after arriving for their visit on Saturday morning.

Lawmakers said in the filing the Minnesotans were denied access due to a new policy from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. The new Noem policy, similar to one temporarily blocked by U.S. Judge Jia Cobb last month, requires seven days notice for lawmakers to conduct oversight visits.

“The duplicate notice policy is a transparent attempt by DHS to again subvert Congress’s will … and this Court’s stay of DHS’s oversight visit policy,” according to the new filing by lawyers representing the 12 Democrats.

DHS cites reconciliation bill

Noem in filings argued the funds for immigration enforcement are not subject to a 2019 appropriations law, referred to as Section 527, that allows for unannounced oversight visits at facilities that hold immigrants.

She said that because the facilities are funded through the “One, Big, Beautiful Bill Act” passed and signed into law last year, the department does not need to comply with Section 527.

The OBBBA, passed through a congressional process called reconciliation, is allowed to adjust federal spending even though it is not an appropriations law.

“This policy is consistent with and effectuates the clear intent of Congress to not subject OBBBA funding to Section 527’s limitations,” according to the Noem memo.  

Congress is currently working on the next funding bill for the Department of Homeland Security. The lawmakers in their filing argue “members of Congress must be able to conduct oversight at ICE detention facilities, without notice, to obtain urgent and essential information for ongoing funding negotiations.”

“Members of Congress are actively negotiating over the funding of DHS and ICE, including consideration of the scope of and limitations on DHS’s funding for the next fiscal year,” according to the filing.

The Democrats who sued include Joe Neguse of Colorado, Adriano Espaillat of New York, Jamie Raskin of Maryland, Robert Garcia of California, J. Luis Correa of California, Jason Crow of Colorado, Veronica Escobar of Texas, Dan Goldman of New York, Jimmy Gomez of California, Raul Ruiz of California, Bennie Thompson of Mississippi and Norma Torres of California.

Neguse, the lead plaintiff in the case, said in a statement that the “law is crystal clear.”

“Instead of complying with the law, DHS is abrogating the court’s order by re-imposing the same unlawful policy,” he said. “Their actions are outrageous and subverting the law, which is why we are going back to court to challenge it — immediately.”

There were 105 immigration arrests in October at a horse racetrack in Wilder, Idaho. Idaho saw one of the country’s largest increases in immigration arrests this year through mid-October compared with the same period in the Biden administration. (Photo courtesy of ACLU of Idaho)

Immigration arrests under the Trump administration continued to increase through mid-October, reaching rates of more than 30,000 a month. But, rather than the convicted criminals the administration has said it’s focused on, an ever-larger share of those arrests were for solely immigration violations.

In 45 states, immigration arrests more than doubled compared with the same period last year, during the Biden administration. The largest increases: There were 1,190 arrests in the District of Columbia compared with just seven last year under the Biden administration. Arrests were also more than five times higher in New Mexico, Idaho, Oregon and Virginia.

“The result stands in contrast to the administration’s objective of arresting the ‘worst of the worst,’” said Ariel Ruiz Soto, a senior policy analyst at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute. Heightened enforcement is likely increasing “collateral” arrests of people found during searches for convicted criminals, he said.

Comparisons between the Trump and Biden administrations were calculated by Stateline in an analysis of data released by the Deportation Data Project, a research initiative by the universities of California at Berkeley and Los Angeles. About 93% of arrests could be identified by state.

While more people were arrested this year, a lower percentage are convicted criminals.

The share of arrested immigrants who had been convicted of violent crimes has dropped from 9% in January to less than 5% in October. The share under Biden was consistently between 10% and 11% during the same period in 2024.

The same trend applies to people arrested solely on immigration violations: Immigration violations alone were behind 20% in April, then rose to 44% of arrests in October, according to Stateline’s analysis.

In some states and the District of Columbia, a majority of arrests were for immigration violations alone: the District of Columbia (80%), New York (61%), Virginia (57%), Illinois (53%), West Virginia (51%) and Maryland (50%).

States with high immigrant populations also saw the most arrests this year. The largest numeric increases were in Texas (up 29,403, triple last year’s figure), Florida (up 14,693, a fourfold increase) and California (up 13,345, a fourfold increase).

The two states with the largest arrest rate increases have responded very differently to President Donald Trump’s deportation mission.

“We’re going to resist like all of the Democratic states,” New Mexico Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham said in an interview with The Santa Fe New Mexican after last year’s election, referring to mass deportation plans. She proposed legislation to ban U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facilities in the state. The legislation failed this year, but Lujan Grisham urged the state legislature to reconsider next year. The state has three privately run ICE detention centers with the capacity for 2,000 people.

Idaho’s Republican governor, Brad Little, is helping ICE under a 287(g) agreement by transporting what his office calls “highly dangerous illegal alien criminals” from county jails to federal custody. The 53 men pictured on the governor’s website have charges ranging from drug possession to sexual assault.

In a news release, the office says the program is intended to take people “after the completion of their sentences,” though an October review by the Idaho Capital Sun found some were transported despite dismissed or still-pending charges.

Nationally, arrests have increased this year from around 17,000 in February, the first full month of President Donald Trump’s current term, to more than 30,000 in September and October. The share of convicted criminals has dropped from 46% to 30%, though the number of convicted criminals arrested still has been higher each month than under President Joe Biden.

Some of the policies that have fed increased arrest numbers face new court battles. This month, a federal judge blocked the administration from making immigration arrests in the District of Columbia without warrants or probable cause.

In August, a federal court blocked the administration’s expansion of expedited removal, which itself allows fast deportations without judicial review. The administration has appealed, arguing that immigrants who have been in the country for less than two years without legal authorization are not guaranteed due process.

Such fast deportations could be used on 2.5 million people, according to a Migration Policy Institute estimate published in September, including 1 million people released at the border with Mexico with court dates and 1.5 million people with temporary protections such as humanitarian parole.

This fall, the share of arrested immigrants with criminal convictions continued to decrease just before and during the federal government shutdown, with only 3% of those arrested and detained having convictions between Sept. 21 and Nov. 16, according to national information analyzed by Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a data research organization at Syracuse University.

“While ICE is detaining more and more individuals, targeting has shifted sharply to individuals without any criminal convictions,” the TRAC report noted.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to clarify a reference to October detention statistics analyzed by Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.

Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.