How a teenage asylum seeker detained by ICE in Minnesota ended up in Michigan

NINA MOINI: A 16-year-old asylum seeker was apprehended by immigration agents in North Minneapolis last month. And unlike thousands of people who were sent to the Whipple Building, DHS ended up sending him to a Christian youth shelter in Michigan. Minnesota Star Tribune reporter Susan Du followed his story and is here with me to talk about her reporting on this young asylum seeker who is going by Sebastian for this story. Susan, thanks for being on the show and sharing your reporting. Really appreciate it.

SUSAN DU: Thank you, Nina.

NINA MOINI: So you were able to talk to 16-year-old Sebastian for your story. Tell us a little bit about him, if you would.

SUSAN DU: Sebastian is a high school student. He's attending Osceola High School, where he is a tri-sport athlete. He's from Ecuador. He's here with his father and some other family members. They came for a better life. They do have pending asylum applications. And during Operation Metro Surge, Sebastian and his father, who goes by Manuel in the story, decided to temporarily move to North Minneapolis, where they felt safer and surrounded by more resources and support.

NINA MOINI: So what do you know about Sebastian's arrest and where he went after?

SUSAN DU: Yeah, so in mid January, Sebastian was out on a food run, just getting dinner for his family, when he was suddenly followed by ICE agents. He was able to call his father just before they detained him. During this process, he didn't get a lot of answers about what the agents intended to do with him. He was fairly confused throughout the whole time that they took him to an office in Bloomington, moved him around to different holding facilities, eventually to a hotel for a night, where he was guarded by numerous agents, then put on a series of commercial flights that eventually took him to Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he was booked into a youth shelter operated by Bethany Christian Services, which is a large contractor of housing for unaccompanied minors.

NINA MOINI: Is it normal for a place like that to take minors with immigration cases? Is it normal for someone to be in this type of situation that Sebastian was in?

SUSAN DU: For a long time, this network of shelters for unaccompanied minors has existed to take in youth who are apprehended while crossing the border. And these are typically asylum-seeking youth who aren't in the US with their guardians. And so it is usual for that to be the case. What has become increasingly common now that fewer minors are crossing the border alone is that minors who are separated from their parents in these domestic internal enforcement operations, such as Metro Surge, are now being sent to these shelters and placed there for long durations of time.

NINA MOINI: So the idea of unaccompanied minors, Susan, this has been at the top of mind for a lot of people ever since Tom Homan made the announcement that there were something like 3,000 missing or unaccompanied children in the state of Minnesota. And we've dug into on the show how the definition that the government is using has sort of shifted. Can you talk a little bit about that?

SUSAN DU: Oh, right, yeah. So traditionally, unaccompanied minors, and even now on the federal government's websites, they're defined as minors that are apprehended while crossing the border alone. But over the past few years, we've seen more cases play out in federal courts, for instance, that describe situations where minors are arrested by local police. And then when their parents come to claim them from the local police station, it's actually federal immigration enforcement agents that are there that then take the parent into custody and take the child into custody but ultimately send the child to a youth shelter for unaccompanied minors.

So there is a shift in how the federal government is defining unaccompanied minors. Whereas, before, they may have truly been crossing the border, seeking entry into the United States without a legal guardian, now they're increasingly being taken from their legal guardians by immigration enforcement, labeled an unaccompanied minor at that point, and then placed in these youth shelters, from which it becomes very difficult, then, for their parents to retrieve them out of.

NINA MOINI: Tell me a little bit more about that, because I understand you talked with Sebastian's father as well as their attorney. What was the process like for them, essentially, trying to locate and figure out what was going on with Sebastian/

SUSAN DU: It was a very frustrating and bewildering process for the family. They had never had any experience navigating that process before. There are various branches of government that were involved in Sebastian's transfer from Minnesota to Michigan that involved the Department of Homeland Security. It involved ICE. It involved the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is the part of the federal government that oversees unaccompanied minors, who are not necessarily refugees. So that's confusing.

But what had essentially happened that resulted in Sebastian being essentially lost through the process was that after he was apprehended by ICE, DHS then transferred him into the custody of ORR. And ICE didn't track exactly how that transfer happened. So Sebastian, as a asylum-seeker who had previously had contact with the federal government, had already been given an alien number or commonly called an A number. This is the number that is used to track him throughout his contacts with the immigration system.

But when he was apprehended by ICE and then transferred to the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which oversees unaccompanied minors, he was given a A-number, which made him virtually untraceable. The ICE attorneys, who were responding to his lawyer's requests for information about where he was, whether he was still in ICE custody or not, weren't able to immediately discover where he was because of this new A-number.

NINA MOINI: And Susan, so there are multiple threads that are so interesting about this story. And one of them is the experience that Sebastian describes of being at this Bethany Christian Services youth shelter in Michigan. What was his experience like that he described to you? And what is your sense for if these types of shelters or organizations would ever be cropping up in Minnesota?

SUSAN DU: There are no shelters for unaccompanied minors that are federally contracted with the federal government right now in Minnesota. There have been lots of these shelters elsewhere in the country that have been operating for many years. Sebastian himself stayed at the Grand Rapids shelter for only about a week. He described having a very aimless experience.

He did say that it was not religious. It wasn't as though this explicitly Christian facility was trying to push religion on him or anything. But he described not really having many objectives while he was there. He spent a lot of time watching TV and listening to music and talking to the other boys who spoke Spanish and just being confused about when he would be allowed to leave and when he could see his family.

It was a very supervised experience. He was always under watch. Even the phone calls that he was allowed to place to his father were done under the supervision of staff. He did mention having some concerns about informed consent around medical care. He was given five vaccinations in each arm, 10 in one setting, as soon as he was booked in. And he didn't know what those vaccines were for, if he had already gotten them, for instance.

And so he just described having a very confusing experience to me. And when I was talking to him, I could just tell by his demeanor that he was still sort of in shock about the whole thing, very muted and very sad.

NINA MOINI: So Sebastian is back with his family, correct? He is out. You were able to talk with them. Where do they go from here? Are they seeking legal action? Are they concerned about the status of their own asylum case?

SUSAN DU: I'm sure that they are still concerned about the status of their asylum case. We know that there have been a lot of rules that have been changing around asylum-seekers, their work authorization, the amount of time it takes for an asylum application to wind its way through the system. And so they do still live in a very precarious state.

I know that when I spoke with Manuel, Sebastian's father, he felt very torn about the family's decision to come to America in the first place. He said that they came in search of opportunities, especially educational opportunities, to better the lives of his children. But with everything going on, they have really begun to second guess their choice.

When I was there, at their temporary home in Minneapolis, I saw boxes of groceries that were like those that are typically packaged and delivered to families that are living in hiding. It was clear that they were living a life in fear, trying to stay out of the public eye as much as possible. And having had this experience, they still have a lot of questions about why this happened to them and what it was all for.

NINA MOINI: And Susan, thank you so much for sharing your reporting with us. And please keep us posted on what continues to happen with Sebastian and his family. Appreciate it.

SUSAN DU: Thank you so much, Nina.

NINA MOINI: That was Minnesota Star Tribune reporter Susan Du.