A pattern of ‘collateral’ arrests by ICE: Immigrant released from jail tells his story

The trouble started when agents burst into a grocery store in St. Paul looking for a customer named Ricardo.

Surveillance footage shows men dressed in black vests labeled “POLICE” walking into a back room and questioning the staff on Jan. 29. Juan, who asked that his surname not be published because he is undocumented, said he was working in another part of the building at the time. Colleagues informed him afterward that they told the men they didn’t know who Ricardo was and that the authorities refused to identify themselves.

A federal document says that a Homeland Security Investigations special agent “was conducting a targeted enforcement action when they encountered and identified [Juan].” Authorities checked Homeland Security databases and found Juan was denied renewal of his Deferred Action Childhood Arrival (DACA) status as a result of a 2020 drunken driving conviction, and that his parents brought him here unlawfully from Mexico as a child in 1998.

They issued a “warrant for arrest of an alien.”

A week later, Juan drove from the grocery to a family business in another part of St. Paul and stepped out of the car. A man wearing a hoodie that said “ERO” (Enforcement and Removal Operations) asked if he was the vehicle owner. After a brief exchange, Juan was handcuffed and taken to a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility at Fort Snelling. Four agents took part in his arrest.

He still has questions, including why the agency said it “encountered and identified” him, when Juan never saw the agents during the Jan. 29 visit.

Juan’s arrest is part of a pattern of ICE rounding up unauthorized immigrants who were not the official target of immigration enforcement actions. The Trump administration says immigration agents are first arresting those with violent criminal histories, but will still detain anyone else they encounter without legal status in what are known as “collateral arrests.” Unlawful presence in the United States is a civil violation, but the White House asserts that anyone here illegally is a criminal.

Details are emerging in Minnesota from immigrants, attorneys and advocates about agents arresting people although they were not an ICE target — because they were near or connected to the person targeted, or suspected of being so — while driving, walking outside or simply at their residence. Unauthorized immigrants are always subject to removal, but the Biden administration prohibited collateral arrests to focus on public safety and national security.

“They had really come to arrest someone else and then they took me in as well,” a Mexican national in Sherburne County jail told Assistant Chief Immigration Judge Ryan Wood. He insisted that he was a hardworking, respectful man with no criminal record, and was given more time to find a lawyer.

A Salvadoran with no criminal history was arrested when ICE went to a home in the Twin Cities to find an enforcement target and he was near the person, according to attorney Gloria Contreras Edin, who successfully argued for a $5,000 bond.

“ICE was looking for someone and he and several individuals were caught up in the sweeps by default,” she said.

A slew of attorneys have said in court that their clients were not targets when they were detained and often had no criminal history. Judges at the Fort Snelling Immigration Court have been granting bond for most detainees who request it in the last few weeks — rarely more than $7,500 and usually less — in a sign that those apprehended were not considered enough of a flight risk or public safety danger to keep behind bars.

Juan said that after arriving for processing at the Bishop Henry Whipple Building at Fort Snelling, he met an Ecuadorian who said he was dropping his child off at the bus stop when ICE agents approached to inquire about someone who shared the same nearby address. The man said he was arrested after he refused to open the door for ICE, and agents found that he, too, lacked legal status.

Juan also met a Cuban man who wanted to be sent back home. According to Juan, ICE agents mockingly said they would send him to Cuba’s Guantánamo Bay, where the U.S. authorities recently flew 178 Venezuelans before deporting them to their native country. Federal agents put him and the Cuban in shackles and drove them to the Washington County Jail in Stillwater for the night. They brought them the next day to Albert Lea’s Freeborn County Jail, one of three Minnesota jails under contract to house ICE detainees.

Juan found that most immigrants locked up in Freeborn County were Hispanic, but some were African, Lebanese, Georgian or Russian. One came from Morocco. Many worked in construction. Juan was one of few detainees fluent in English, and he helped translate other men’s questions into a jail messaging system.

He said they could text, talk and video call using a paid service and that he had a circle of support outside, including his partner and other family and friends. But Juan found that a lot of people inside “had zero to no contact” and depleted resources from being locked up for so long. One father of three, he said, had been jailed for more than a year while appealing his case and hadn’t qualified for bond.

“The whole mood in that place was a roller coaster of emotions, because as you saw people that had similar cases to you not be successful in their search for a bond or fighting a case, people would [succumb] to desperation,” Juan said.

He saw many immigrants mentally prepare for deportation because their family couldn’t pay rent for another month, and they didn’t know how their children would eat. With so much trouble finding pro bono lawyers, he noted, they didn’t know if it was worth it to spend thousands fighting a case they might not win. He believed many did not know their legal rights.

“They were reaching out to a lot of the pro bono lawyers and the wait times were terrible — it meant for them to be housed for quite a long time until their chance came up, and a lot of them [lacked] the monetary funds to sustain their family outside,” said Juan.

He added: “People tried to have a sense of humor, but deep down, you realize everybody is having that mental struggle.”

Attorney Cameron Giebink believes that ICE is targeting people with domestic violence and drunken driving charges, as well as those who have returned here after being deported. He said ICE agents are staking out houses where they believe a target might be, “and any time they see anyone who ‘meets the description,’ they follow them and arrest them.” That means that those who live with unauthorized immigrants facing those charges can be swept up by immigration agents if they don’t have legal papers, according to Giebink.

Trying to fight his case following a collateral arrest, one Ecuadorian in the Sherburne County Jail told Judge Wood that he had called a lot of lawyers and no one answered. The voice of his boss, Valentin Vera, shook with emotion as he expressed support in court for the detainee — who had overstayed a visitor’s visa — and said the man was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Vera told the Minnesota Star Tribune that he had hired the Ecuadorian in 2023 at his concrete masonry company to work on gas station jobs. He said ICE came to a Minneapolis boardinghouse where his employee and other immigrants were sleeping one night. Agents were looking for someone else who wasn’t there but wound up checking everyone’s IDs and arresting the Ecuadorian man and others, according to Vera.

Juan appeared virtually for his bond hearing in late February, two weeks after his arrest. Attorney Graham Ojala-Barbour told Immigration Judge Sarah Mazzie that his client learned a lot from his DWI, hasn’t had problems since and has extensive ties to his community.

After paying a $5,000 bond, Juan was driven in shackles back to Fort Snelling. He was accompanied by a young Mexican national who had also just made bond and told Juan that he and his relatives were pulled over on their way to work in a Twin Cities suburb, but they didn’t appear to be ICE’s original targets.

When he was a child, Juan and his family returned to Mexico after a few years and re-entered the United States in 2007. He attended college and worked for distribution and fulfillment companies.

Juan said he was pulled over in 2020 for drinking and driving a few blocks from a family gathering. The conviction led to the denial of Juan’s application to renew DACA — which protects recipients from deportation — a few years later. Juan joined the family business of his longtime partner, who along with her family is an American citizen. They have two children.

He said after the agents came, their family’s grocery store lost customers for a few days as rumors and fear spread. A legal adviser called the St. Paul Police Department to complain that armed men barged in with police vests, and he was told local police had not been there. Juan and the employees had assumed the men were with ICE but weren’t sure at the time.

After decades in the country, he considers himself Americanized. Juan noted that he’s always paid his taxes and that his business provides jobs. He had been pursuing other forms of relief to try to stay in the country. Shortly before ICE came for him, Juan laughed over a John Oliver segment that featured a citizen saying he voted for Trump because the president vowed to “get rid of the bad hombres.” The Trump supporter complained that a longtime restaurant owner who was just deported from his town was a “good hombre.”

“You think it’s not going to affect you until it does,” said Juan. “I didn’t see myself as having to think about this — I don’t think I had processed it in my head — until I was in handcuffs.”