ICE moving detainees from rural Minnesota to Texas jail

A Venezuelan national was approaching the courthouse in Faribault for a hearing on his pending criminal case on Jan. 28 when Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested him.

Immigration authorities took the man, Hernando Fidel Avila Gamez, to the Freeborn County Jail to join a growing number of noncitizens facing deportation proceedings. He missed his appearance before a Rice County judge on charges of felony burglary and gross misdemeanor criminal sexual conduct. He also didn’t get to make his case to an immigration judge before ICE took him across the country.

Now, Avila Gamez is a thousand miles away at an immigration detention center in Texas — among a group of ICE detainees transferred from rural Minnesota jails.

The Minnesota Star Tribune has identified at least 11 detainees who were recently moved from the Kandiyohi, Sherburne and Freeborn County jails to the IAH Polk Adult Detention Facility an hour north of Houston. ICE has not responded to a request for explanation, but attorneys suggest it may be a matter of Minnesota running out of detention space as the Trump administration pushes for mass deportations and expanded jailing of unauthorized residents. Nationally, ICE detention space is already over capacity with 42,000 noncitizens locked up.

“It’s a big country, so it’s effectively like a mini-deport — you’re taking [detainees] and putting them a thousand miles away from their family,” said attorney Cameron Giebink, who represents noncitizens in immigration court.

He confirmed that some people who appear to have no criminal record were also moved to the Texas jail to await a bond hearing and said some immigrants were taken from Minnesota to jails in South Dakota, Nebraska and Iowa for space reasons.

On Jan. 27, a Burnsville resident who is an El Salvadoran national was pulled over in Bloomington for driving with a revoked license. The man, who has no known criminal record in Minnesota, was scheduled for his first hearing before Immigration Judge Ryan Wood on Tuesday. Yet when his name came up on the docket, a sheriff’s deputy in Sherburne County said that he was now in custody at the Texas facility.

ICE has long had the authority to move detainees between jails and out of the state where they were arrested. For example, when Illinois enacted a law that in 2022 banned ICE detention centers, immigration agents then took people arrested there to jails in Wisconsin and other jurisdictions.

Some observers say the latest moves are unusual for Minnesota and that transferring detainees far away makes it harder for lawyers to access their clients and work with them to adequately prepare for their cases. Several attorneys were forced to scramble following last-minute changes in venue for immigrants moved from Minnesota to Texas.

On Thursday morning, attorney Lauren Schmoke appeared virtually for a hearing at the Fort Snelling Immigration Court to represent a longtime Iowa resident from Guatemala. ICE arrested the man this month and took him to the Kandiyohi County Jail in western Minnesota.

After ICE moved him to Texas, she said, the Department of Homeland Security filed a motion to change the venue to the Conroe, Texas, immigration court at 3:15 p.m. Wednesday and the judge granted it just before the hearing the following day at 8:30 a.m.

“Everybody in my office and his family were ready for him to have court today, and he didn’t,” she told the Star Tribune afterward.

Six other Latin American immigrants scheduled to appear Thursday by videoconference at the Fort Snelling Immigration Court also had their hearings delayed so the government could change the venue to the Conroe, Texas, court that serves IAH Polk detainees.

Had she been able to respond, Schmoke said, she would have argued that the most appropriate venue for the case is not Minnesota but the court in Omaha, which has jurisdiction over Iowans. She said it’s been difficult to communicate with clients at IAH Polk and that her client’s hearing was delayed to April 1 in Texas.

Schmoke, who is based in Omaha, said she noticed that many local detainees were moved to Texas when she appeared in the Omaha Immigration Court this week. Her law office has fielded calls from residents of other states being moved to Texas.

“I believe this is a space issue,” she said.

Immigration attorney Meghan Byrnes was prepared Wednesday to represent Avila Gamez before Immigration Judge Sarah Mazzie. Like in Schmoke’s case, she said DHS filed a motion to change the venue to the Conroe, Texas, court the afternoon before; she did not get an alert about the judge approving the motion until four minutes before the hearing was supposed to start.

She told the Star Tribune that Avila Gamez’s immigration hearing was reset for March 4 and voiced concern about his transfer to IAH Polk. “We’ll have a lot of work to do after the next hearing, and I will definitely need to be able to communicate with him,” said Byrnes. While that can be done electronically, she added, “I would still like to have access to my client, who lives here, works here and has family here.”

His public defender wrote in a Feb. 4 letter to the court that Avila Gamez was taken into custody by ICE agents while trying to get to his hearing for the 2024 charges.

“It was unknown at that time where Mr. Avila Gamez was being taken or what was happening,” she said.

The court issued a warrant for his arrest following the missed appearance, which his attorney requested be quashed and a new hearing set so he could address the charges from ICE detention.

Avila Gamez is set to appear in Rice County Court remotely from IAH Polk next week.