ICE illegally detaining, moving Minnesota children to Texas faster than courts can respond
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Elvis Joel Tipan Echeverria, a man from Ecuador with an open asylum case, and his 2-year-old daughter were pulled from their car by ICE agents after arriving home Thursday.
In less than eight hours, Echeverria and his daughter were on a commercial flight to a Texas family detention facility, even though a judge had ordered ICE to return the toddler to her Minnesota home.
“The court ordered the release of this child, and 20 minutes later they were put on a flight,” said Irina Vaynerman, an attorney representing the man and his daughter.
The 2-year-old’s detention is part of an accelerating trend of what Vaynerman describes as ICE agents sending children and adults with legal immigration status out of state to avoid dealing with accountability from the federal court system.
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“Minnesotans are being unlawfully detained and are then being quickly marshalled across state lines by the government,” Vaynerman said. “They’re doing that in order to evade the reach of the federal district court in Minnesota.”
Echeverria’s 2-year-old daughter was returned to Minnesota on Friday and is now with her mother. Her father is still in detention. But several lawyers told MPR News the trend of illegally detaining immigrants, including young children and shipping them out of state has been widespread.
Early on Thursday morning, Maria Velasco Hurtado was being driven to work by a neighbor when the vehicle she was in was stopped by ICE officers. According to her attorney, Velasco Hurtado tried to show the agents papers proving her legal permission to be in the United States.
But the agents removed her from the car, drove to her home in Hopkins and, according to her lawyer, used her as “bait” to detain the rest of the family, including two children in first and fourth grade. The entire family was put on a flight to Texas within a few hours despite a federal judge ruling that the family be kept in Minnesota, according to their attorney.
Their attorney and several other lawyers MPR News spoke to says what’s happened to these children and their families is part of a “conveyor belt” strategy that is illegally detaining immigrants in Minnesota en masse and moving them out of state beyond the reach of legal counsel.
In Columbia Heights, Erika Ramos, the mother of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, said her son and husband, Adrian Conejo Arias, are still detained at the Dilley family detention center, where she’s worried about Liam’s deteriorating health.
“The situation of my husband Adrian and my son Liam inside the detention center is deeply concerning,” Ramos told MPR News on Monday. “Liam is getting sick because the food they receive is not of good quality. He has stomach pain, he’s vomiting, he has a fever and he no longer wants to eat.”
Marc Prokosch, a lawyer representing the family, said they entered the U.S. legally —contradicting an ICE official’s claim they crossed the border illegally as a “family unit.” Prokosch said the parents have no criminal record in the state and no order of deportation.
For Prokosch, like many other lawyers, ICE tactics being deployed in Minnesota seem designed to evade the law.
“That’s intentional,” Prokosch said. “Since Metro Surge came, they’ve been moving them all out to Texas … within 24 hours. That’s one of the core elements of being able to help somebody in the legal sphere, is to be able to communicate with them … it’s really hard to talk to them.”
— Elizabeth Shockman, MPR News
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