‘I’m going crazy': Delays, confusion as ICE moves Minnesota detainees across the country

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is transferring immigrants arrested in Minnesota to jails in Texas, Louisiana and Colorado as the agency runs out of space in the three local jails contracted to provide beds for ICE detainees.

The practice is leading to delayed hearings and longer detention times — and sometimes panic for people stranded a thousand miles from home.

“I’m going crazy,” one Ecuadorian man said from a private detention center in Louisiana during a virtual hearing with Fort Snelling Immigration Judge Audrey Carr last week.

The 24-year-old illegally crossed into the U.S. in late 2022 and lived in Minneapolis until Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested him. He was then moved to the detention center in the city of Monroe, about an hour south of the Arkansas border.

The Ecuadorian was distraught to learn his proceedings would be delayed because of the transfer from Minnesota.

“I’m a family man, and I would like to do my hearing today,” he insisted.

The detainee said his 4-year-old daughter cried every time he called her from jail. She didn’t want to be with anyone else, he said; she didn’t want to eat.

He spoke in such long, rapid, anguished sentences that the Spanish interpreter had to interject so that his words could be relayed in English. Then the judge asked him to please listen.

“I hear you that you’re a family man,” Carr said. “I hear that your daughter is missing you.”

But, she said, she could not hear his case that day because he was not being detained in Minnesota. If he wanted to be released, he would have to ask a judge in a Louisiana court.

Meanwhile, a longtime Worthington, Minn., resident with no criminal record was subject to a “collateral” arrest and transferred to IAH Polk Adult Detention Facility in Texas, attorney Lauren Schmoke said. She said ICE was detaining her client’s coworker at his home when her client arrived and was also arrested.

The man was scheduled for a hearing in Fort Snelling in late February, a few weeks after his arrest. He could have been released on bond then.

But the transfer led to a series of delays. By the time of his first hearing at the Conroe, Texas, court in mid-April, he will have been locked up for two months.

Schmoke said in an email that she recently appeared before an immigration judge in Conroe who “said they are now very overloaded and waits for hearings are longer than they were in the recent past.”

An hour north of Houston, the privately owned IAH Polk is a common destination for ICE detainees transferred out of Minnesota .

Attorney Cameron Giebink had a client with no criminal record who was moved from Minnesota to Texas, had his hearing delayed two weeks and had to find his own way back home after being released on bond.

“This practice is delaying custody hearing by weeks in many cases, at significant cost to taxpayers and the prospective immigrants who often face significant costs as a result of the move,” Giebink said in an email.

The transfers have caused confusion at Fort Snelling Immigration Court, too.

One day in early March, Immigration Judge Sarah Mazzie said she would start the afternoon hearings with the case of an immigrant held in Denver.

But when she called out the man’s name, no one from Denver appeared on the videoconferencing system. Instead, a deputy at IAH Polk said she had a different detainee ready for a 1:30 hearing. Mazzie said no one told her Polk was connecting.

“I thought Denver was connecting,” she said.

The judge told everyone to stand by, adding: “This is a mess.”

Mazzie told the Texas deputy to stay connected, though it would be a while before she got to the detainee there. And she explained she was somewhat glad Denver did not connect because it’s a “nightmare” when a bond hearing is scheduled from a place where she has no jurisdiction.

Legal counsel for the Denver detainee, who is a Mexican national, raised concerns. An attorney said their client was anxious to have a hearing “and so we’re chasing rabbits.”

“Exactly … same here,” Mazzie said.

When she finally got to the Texas detainee’s hearing, Mazzie explained that Minnesota jails had insufficient space. She said Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, wanted her to approve a change of venue to a court in Texas. Did he have any objection?

“I just want my deportation,” said the detainee, a 20-year-old Nicaraguan who entered the U.S. illegally in 2021.

Records show that the man moved to St. Cloud and appeared to land on ICE’s radar after police ticketed him for driving with a suspended license on Feb. 1 in Waite Park.

Mazzie said she would grant his request.

On another day, the judge asked a Denver detainee if he had any objections to moving his case to the immigration court there. He said he wanted the case in Minnesota.

“I have my family there, and here in Colorado, I don’t have anybody,” he said.

In late February, Mazzie criticized Homeland Security for trying to make last-minute oral change of venue motions for six ICE detainees who were on the docket that day but did not appear for their hearings because they had been moved to Texas.

The judge wanted the department to file paper motions that would give detainees and their attorneys 10 days to respond, since they may not want their cases transferred if they were released on bond and returned to Minnesota. She said the detainees had been arrested Feb. 10-12 and the department could have filed the papers while the immigrants were being held in Texas.

The Ecuadorian man was transferred to the Richwood Correctional Center in Louisiana. He didn’t specify conditions there during his hearing, but a report by immigrant advocacy groups and the ACLU last summer based on more than 6,000 interviews found “systemic human rights abuses” at the state’s ICE jails.

One Richwood detainee reported that he suffered from asthma attacks because of black mold. Other men told researchers that the facility had only two water fountains and that they were clogged and impossible to drink from. Others said they developed chronic constipation and hemorrhoids from the food. The report detailed instances of people denied crucial medical care.

The Ecuadorian appeared to have come to the attention of ICE because he was charged with misdemeanor theft last year and police arrested him for fleeing the scene on foot after being involved in a vehicle collision in February.

“I don’t want to be here anymore — please help me,” the Ecuadorian pleaded to Immigration Judge Carr.

He requested that he be deported. When the judge asked if he would be in danger if returned to Ecuador, he said many people wanted to harm him. But he said he didn’t want to be locked up anymore and didn’t know what was happening with his daughter.

Carr ordered him removed. The man said he wouldn’t appeal.

“I want to leave now,” he said.