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Each day, a variation of the same, surreal conversation unfolds between staff at the Center for Victims of Torture and the refugees and asylum-seekers they serve.

“This reminds me of what I came here to escape.”

“If ICE gets me, will I be tortured?”

They’re all sentiments social worker Jill Davidson said she has been hearing from her clients since the Trump administration deployed thousands of masked federal agents into the Twin Cities. 

The center provides psychotherapy, social services and medical care to roughly 300 clients in Minnesota, mostly at its clinic in St. Paul. Those clients are survivors of torture and state violence.

Now, staff say some conditions their clients face in the United States would qualify them for their services had they happened overseas. That includes clients who were recently detained by federal agents.

‘Withholding medical care is a form of torture’

During intake at the clinic, victims of torture often say that they could not turn to local police for help when government soldiers hurt them, said Davidson, the social worker.

“That’s exactly what’s happening here,” she said. 

Six of the center’s clients were sent to the detention center in El Paso, Texas, where they couldn’t maintain contact with anyone, if they could be reached at all, according to Sara Nelson, the program manager at the St. Paul clinic. No one knew exactly what was happening to them, she said.

All are asylum-seekers with permits to work in the United States. One has been released, and one has been moved to a detention center in New Mexico.

“It's really horrifying to go from giving someone psychotherapy to help them cope with past torture, to have them be disappeared into this detention facility where you know that people have been harmed and that people have died and to not be able to contact them,” Nelson said.

Nelson described one client with a serious medical condition who was scheduled for surgery in February before being locked up. The facility refused to give the woman her medication or accept letters from her doctor.

“Withholding medical care is a form of torture,” she said.

Nelson said staff at the center waited for one of their clients at a scheduled immigration check-in, but he never came out. He was sent to Texas, where staff have not been able to reach him. 

Last week, Nelson’s colleague received a call from an unknown number. It was from that client’s cellmate in El Paso. He said their client had written the number on a note and passed it to him as he was being released.

“The idea that people are passing secret notes to communicate with the outside is not normal,” Nelson said. “This is not how democracies work.”

The center hasn’t been able to get a message back to their client.

The Department of Homeland Security responded to an email for comment, falsely stating “all detainees are provided with proper meals, water, medical treatment and have opportunities to communicate with their family members and lawyers. All detainees receive full due process.” 

 of a facility in Montana that documented failures to provide required medical care, food and access to lawyers. A 

 detailed how "immigration authorities have weaponized medical neglect to encourage self-deportation," and a federal judge in Minnesota concluded ICE had disobeyed 

 stemming from its activities in Minnesota.

‘What is the privilege of being innocent?’

It’s not just detained clients who suffer.

The Center for Victims of Torture was founded in Minnesota in 1985 to help rehabilitate survivors of torture, although today the nongovernmental agency has a policy and advocacy arm, and offices across the world. 

Until recently, the center’s Victorian-style house-turned-clinic in St. Paul was a place where asylum-seekers could go in search of healing. 

So much laughter used to travel up from the waiting room and through the creaky walls that staff providing therapy on the top floor would sometimes pop downstairs and ask everyone to turn it down a notch. 

These days, circles of empty chairs fill each room like relics in an old museum.

Yasna Shahbazi, a psychotherapist at the clinic, said her online meetings with clients are all “back to ground zero,” as if the torture from years ago happened yesterday. There’s no looking forward. “All my case notes are similar,” she said. 

She said her clients all ask her why this is happening to them when they have done nothing wrong. 

It’s all crisis response. Shahbazi and others triage their clients’ insomnia, panic attacks and nightmares about being followed by law enforcement that — in a turn of events — are triggered by the U.S. government, not the places they fled.

Most of the center’s clients are hiding at home, and staff discreetly deliver groceries to keep many of them fed. It’s not the first time many have had to hide. 

MPR News spoke with two clients who recently fled ethnic cleansing in Ethiopia. Both have permits to work legally in the United States. Each asked not to be named to protect his safety.

One was a medical doctor in Ethiopia who was arrested for his political views and who continued to treat sick people while he himself was tortured in a concentration camp.  

He said the persecution of his ethnic group began with officials using dehumanizing rhetoric. Eventually, the doctor said, he could not drive his car for fear of being targeted and pulled over because of his ethnicity. The government started going door to door.  

“You couldn’t even go out to mourn,” he said. 

The man hasn’t ventured out of his home in Minnesota in nearly a month.

Another man lost so much strength while hiding in Ethiopia that he needed physical therapy when he arrived in Minnesota. That’s one of the services he received at the center before the federal deployment. 

He thinks a lot about the parallels between events in Ethiopia and in the United States —especially, he said, in what he sees as the collective punishment of a minority group, regardless of who they are, what they have contributed or whether they are innocent.  

“If they labeled us due to our skin color or accent,” he said, “what’s the privilege of being innocent?”

For the two clients at the Center for Victims of Torture, one thing kindles hope while they hide: Minnesotans’ dedication to protecting their immigrant neighbors. 

The doctor from Ethiopia watched aerial footage of tens of thousands of people taking to the streets of downtown Minneapolis the day before Alex Pretti was killed.

“There are a lot of good people,” he said. “We will remember it. I will remember it.”

The other client said he is touched by those “sacrificing their life” for people they don’t know personally. When it is safe to go back outside, he said this all makes him even more committed to serving the people of Minnesota. 

“It shows how sincerely devoted, how committed they are toward the basic principles of human rights,” he said. 

Though America has not proven to be the country he envisioned when he came, he finds hope in the people who continue to embody the values he once understood to be American.

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Cari Spencer

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The torture rehabilitation clinic has pivoted to helping people process trauma from Operation Metro Surge.

Asylum-seekers at the Center for Victims of Torture say ICE reminds them of what they escaped

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