ICE uses case filings, MSP flights for quiet Twin Cities arrests

Immigration attorneys in the Twin Cities say federal agents are quietly arresting noncitizens at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport and at scheduled immigration appointments, using people's own efforts to legalize their status to locate and detain them.^[1]

On a recent Friday, about a dozen detainees boarded a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) flight at MSP and about a dozen others got off, with some believed to be headed to the Appleton immigration detention center in western Minnesota.^[1] Immigration lawyer David Wilson says ICE has summoned clients with pending permanent residency applications to "case review and interview" appointments, sending letters that stress "This appointment is not a date for your departure from the United States," yet several people who appeared have been taken into custody.^[1] Another Twin Cities attorney, Paschal Nwokocha, says a family with long-pending asylum cases was detained after flying from Georgia to Minneapolis, and he has seen more airport-based ICE arrests nationally.^[1]

Wilson and other lawyers now urge clients to build "safety plans" before any ICE appointment: tell friends or relatives exactly where they are going, arrange child care and access to money, and retain counsel in advance who can quickly file in court if they are arrested.^[1] Attorneys say the quiet shift has spread anxiety through immigrant communities that had been encouraged in recent years to come forward, file applications and attend interviews, and now fear that cooperation has made them easier to find.^[1]

The Biden administration came into office promising a more humane immigration system and moved to roll back several Trump-era restrictions, a change that coincided with a sharp rise in border crossings and a deepening immigration-court backlog. Advocates argued that overwhelmed border stations, full shelters and limited detention capacity pushed officials back toward detention, rapid expulsions and other tools the White House had previously criticized, creating pressure on ICE to find ways to enforce removal orders away from the border.

Civil-liberties debates around immigration enforcement at airports have long overlapped with fights over racial profiling in aviation security, where both Republican and Democratic officials have publicly rejected singling out travelers based on race or ethnicity. Critics of airport-based immigration arrests warn that, in practice, targeting people who fit certain immigration or national-origin profiles risks the same kinds of unequal scrutiny that civil-rights advocates have challenged in airport security screening for decades.

1. FOX 9