Minnesota immigration attorneys overwhelmed by break-neck pace of cases
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Immigration enforcement has ramped up in Minnesota. The Department of Homeland Security says at least 2,000 ICE agents are in the state. In addition, Customs and Border Patrol agents are here arresting people. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said over the weekend that hundreds more agents would join them.
As these agencies ramp up their activity in Minnesota, reports of detainments are almost too much to keep up with.
David Wilson is an immigration attorney with Wilson Law Group. He joined Minnesota Now with Nina Moini to talk about what he’s seeing with immigration cases.
The following has been edited for length and clarity. Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation.
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What is your caseload like, and has it increased in the last week?
The number of calls that we get per day has increased exponentially, from people either calling about someone who has been detained or wanting to know their rights and fearful that they're going to be detained.
At one point, we were exceeding 500 calls per day. That's only gone up since last Monday, and with the increase of officers in town over the weekend, the number of calls over the weekend also went up exponentially. So we find ourselves tracking people around the country and trying to litigate their release on a scale that in all my 28 years of practice I've never had to attempt.
This weekend we filed at least 10 different actions around the country. But there is a limit to what we can do. [Immigration lawyers are] really communicating with each other a lot about our capacity and who's available.
We've been very lucky that there are larger firms who have litigators who are now interested in participating in this project. I think there's a flood of lawyers — who may not be immigration lawyers but definitely are litigators and are willing to put their hat out and volunteer some time for the rest to really respond to this moment.
What are you seeing at Fort Snelling, where immigration court is located?
Fort Snelling is a target for protesting — and rightfully so — given all the events that have happened in Minneapolis.
On the other hand, these protests also overlap with people who are trying respond to their obligations to the court that's in the building. And so you have traffic that's unprecedented around Fort Snelling. They're erecting fencing and putting in road barricades. There's a constant presence of law enforcement officers in the parking lots, in the building, and even going through security this morning there were 100 officers standing around, all with weapons.
For someone who is coming to apply for asylum or just attend a check-in, it's incredibly intimidating.
What measures that ICE is taking stand out to you as most concerning or illegal?
The one that stands out the most — and it's likely legal, but it's nonetheless very intrusive — are license plate readers. And just because a person may have a foreign name, they're drawing the conclusion that that person needs to be engaged for possible enforcement.
I've had clients who are lawfully in status, who have been following the law and have paperwork to show they're in status, and they're being detained anyways. And so at that point, that's patently illegal, because the person has no right to be detained and immigration isn't bothering to read the paperwork.
And they're hauling people down to Fort Snelling and terrorizing them by holding them in custody rooms for several hours until someone who actually maybe knows what they're reading looks at it.
Have any of your clients been deported?
The ICE flights have continued, and if anything, they're happening faster. We've had instances where we've had to ask a federal judge, even on a Sunday, to intervene to stop someone being removed to El Salvador because he has an order of protection against El Salvador. But the government was indicating to him, “You're going to El Salvador on Monday morning.”
We had one client who has an active proceeding and has the right to see a judge. And immigration, for some reason, didn't listen to all the different people telling them “this person can't be removed yet,” and he ended up in El Salvador anyways.
The reality is, they're trying to move so fast with so little regard for the normal processes that they would have followed even a year ago that it's almost like taking off all the safeguards that would protect from such mistakes — they're gone.
So people are rightfully upset and worried that if they go into into custody, they're going to get swept up into something that's going to move so fast it's going to spit them out in a foreign country.
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