Inside a Texas detention facility last month, Esme repeated the advice a guard gave her: Eat the food they give you. Don’t cry. Keep your family in your heart.
“I know it’s hard, but it’s the only way you can survive here,” she recalled the guard telling her.
Of the hundreds of people recently detained by immigration authorities in Minnesota, Esme was among the more fortunate: by the time agents flew her to Texas on the same day she was taken into custody, she already had an attorney.
She attributes it to quick-acting, outside support. The habeas corpus petition her attorney filed is what got her back to Minnesota, the place where she’s lived for over 25 years. It also helped her out of the detention center where she described people struggling to keep warm, prevent infection and contact the outside world.
“When you’re inside, you can’t do anything. Your life is in the hands of your family or your friend,” Esme said. MinnPost is not using her name in order to prevent retaliation by the federal government.
Helping others be prepared for the detention and habeas process – knowing who to call in an emergency, memorizing phone numbers, finding an attorney and your “alien number” – is a core reason she wanted to describe her story.
Although Operation Metro Surge is winding down, the legal tailwind it created is not. Hundreds of people who were detained in Minnesota are still fighting their detention, and many more who have been released are still in the midst of deportation proceedings.
Also still in full swing are allegations of unconstitutional conduct by federal immigration officials – and the historic push by lawyers, judges and legal aid groups to respond using the court system.
The critical first steps after an arrest
Esme attributes much of the reason she’s home today to a single phone call.
She made the call from the back of a federal agent’s car as she sat handcuffed on her way to the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building in St. Paul. The friend she spoke to not only answered, but immediately began searching for an attorney.
When they spoke again a few hours later, Esme learned she already had a lawyer. And the friend on the other line knew to ask for a critical piece of information – Esme’s “a-number,” or alien number used to locate people in the detention system.
Esme wrote it on her arm. Then she boarded the plane, handcuffed at the wrists and ankles.
In Latin, habeas corpus translates to “you shall have the body.” In the current context, those petitions are being used to demand the federal government prove its legal basis for holding the “bodies” of people in immigration detention centers.
Esme’s petition is one of 1,061 filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota in the 13 weeks since Dec. 1. That timeframe corresponds with Operation Metro Surge and represents a historic rise in habeas petitions as people poured into the detention system.
Just 60 were filed in the same timeframe last year, data show.
On paper, those petitions ask a judge to decide whether the detention is legal.
Minnesota’s chief federal district court judge, Patrick Schlitz, said in a Feb. 6 email that his three clerks had been working day and night, including weekends, to alert him of new filings. They also alerted him when the federal government missed a deadline in an ongoing case.
The goal is to respond quickly, often with an order for someone to be released.
Those petitions “weigh heavily” on him, he said, because they are so often filed by people who have been unlawfully detained.
“So if I, say, take time off to see a movie, someone might sit in detention an extra two or three hours before I order him released – or someone might be flown to Texas before I order that he not be removed from Minnesota,” he said.
‘It’s easy to have lost your hope’
There were rules in the 72-bunk bed tent, Esme said. Don’t touch one another, even for a hug. When it’s time for guards to count detainees, get into bed.
As the week wore on, Esme said the cold and dusty tent became crowded as airplanes dropped off new loads of people. It was impossible to keep the five or six toilets sanitary, she said, despite repeated requests for cleaning supplies that were only twice answered.
Esme worried for the people who needed medication but didn’t have it, lost the will to eat and were sick with coughs, stomach pains and diarrhea. Many of the people she met were other women, mostly Latina, and like her worried for their kids at home.
“It’s easy to have lost your hope there,” she said.
A December letter from the American Civil Liberties Union describes “significant abuse” at Camp East Montana, the largest immigration processing center in the country that formerly served as a Japanese internment camp. A report published Jan. 27 describes unsanitary and overcrowded conditions in several U.S. detention centers including a lack of food, water and contact with attorneys. A Feb. 13 letter from U.S. lawmakers to federal officials raises alarm about a pattern of in-custody deaths.
The Department of Homeland Security did not respond this week to a request for comment about conditions like those, or allegations of due process violations.
Related: Free speech advocates see a pattern as ICE protesters, observers face violence in Minnesota
Esme said she found strength and comfort from the group of women who she had flown to Texas with from Minnesota.
“When you cry, we’re going to support you,” she said.
It also helped knowing her legal case was already in the works.
Still, she spent three days inside without being able to contact friends or family. Finally, her friend gave her critical news: A judge had already ruled in her habeas case, finding her detention unconstitutional and ordering immigration authorities to return her back to Minnesota.
“You hear a lot of stories inside. One part of me was like, I believe what my friend says, that they’re going to release me. But at the same time you know they [immigration authorities] don’t follow the rules exactly.”
A historic surge in habeas corpus petitions
As of January, 73,000 people were being held in U.S. detention processing centers. It’s the most in the country’s history, and likely to continue rising. And in this year so far, Minnesota had more habeas corpus petitions per capita than any other state except New Mexico.
The situation has driven historic efforts to crowdsource legal help.
Attorney James Cook has been involved since late November, when people in South Minneapolis began asking him for help getting out of the Whipple detention center.
As a lawyer who works on issues of civil rights, government overreach and the U.S. constitution, he said there’s “no way” someone is getting due process when they are transferred out of state within 48 hours.
And it’s only gotten faster.
Cook went viral on social media when he appeared at the Whipple building with his name and phone number written on a notebook. In addition to connecting people with attorneys who can file habeas corpus cases, he’s also been urging colleagues from across the country to help – especially given the conditions immigrants are being detained in.
“I was like ‘Attorneys, this is the time. If you would have thought about it, you would have helped out when Japanese people were being interned. Or you know, Germany,’” he said.
In early February, the City of Minneapolis allocated an additional $500,000 for legal aid in response to the surge in habeas petitions. Groups like the Minnesota Habeas Project are connecting people with pro bono legal services.
Related: Minnesota attorney general’s evidence portal draws nearly 1,500 submissions in first month
On Feb. 12, a Minnesota judge ordered that federal officials must hold detainees at the Whipple Building for at least 72 hours before flying them out of state. The order also says government officials must provide noncitizens with their a-number, free and private telephone calls and a list of free legal services within an hour of detention there.
That class action lawsuit, which alleges a slew of due process violations, is among several filed in response to Operation Metro Surge. But it’s still in the early stages, and the judge’s conditions are temporary. The next hearing is scheduled for March 5.
David Wilson, a veteran immigration attorney in Minnesota, said he filed more habeas petitions in the first four days of January than in his entire 27-year career. He and his colleagues worked 12- to 13-hour days, seven days a week, he said, both due to the volume of people needing help and the panic they feel.
“All this work in the background within the legal system, within the court system just shows the importance of … having a judiciary that will hear people,” Wilson said.
In his Feb. 6 email, Schlitz said judges from four states – Missouri, Nebraska, Iowa and North Dakota – were helping him with the surge in habeas cases.
He’s among the growing list of people raising alarm that, despite the rise in those filings, the federal government doesn’t always follow judges’ orders.
“To be clear: Everyone is working very, very hard: judges, law clerks, Clerk’s Office staff, attorneys for petitioners, and attorneys for the government. All of us are sleep-deprived and stressed, but we’re doing our best to make sure the rule of law is observed in the midst of the ICE surge,” he wrote.
Habeas cases are waning, but the effects will linger
Finally, in the middle of the night, guards brought Esme into a waiting room.
She spent hours pacing with a blanket on top of her head, trying to ward off a headache from the cold, while worrying she would be transported to Louisiana.
But then she heard the clanking sound of chains. The noise scared her, but it also sounded just like the handcuffs used in transport. On the airplane, she noticed how many fewer passengers there were than on the ride to Texas days before.
“I think it’s when my body collapsed, emotionally (and) physically,” she said of her arrival back home.
Even after getting back, her body is slow to recover. And she’s worried for the women she grew close to inside, whose stories she doesn’t know the end to.
The total number of people flown out of Whipple to facilities in Texas, Louisiana and other states during Operation Metro Surge is unclear. But week-by-week data show habeas filings crept up over time as immigration officials took more people out of their homes, schools and workplaces.
Esme was apprehended on her morning drive to work. She’s grateful that, at least, her daughter was at school and didn’t have to witness her being taken into custody.
The most recent data, from the week of Feb. 15-21, suggest habeas filings are tapering off. But about a quarter of the habeas cases filed in the timeframe analyzed by MinnPost are still open and moving through the court system.
And habeas filings in the Minnesota court likely represent only a sliver of the total number of unconstitutional detentions, as not all of them are being challenged in court.
For people like Esme, the circumstances surrounding a single habeas petition are life-changing. And they’re just the first step in the process of getting out of detention, then fighting an immigration case.
“I hope I can stay,” she said. “[To] see my kids grow old and have their families.”
