Homan Said They Were ‘Criminals.’ Minnesota Detainees Tell a Different Story.

When White House border czar Tom Homan announced the end of the administration’s Minnesota surge, he claimed victory, stating that the operation “greatly reduced the number of targets for deportation” and numerous “violent criminals” were taken off the streets.

But NOTUS reviewed dozens of habeas corpus lawsuits filed in Minnesota challenging the legality of imprisonments and interviewed many of those detainees, whose stories paint a very different picture than the one described by the Trump administration.

Judges appear unwilling to grant any kind of reprieve to immigrants who have even a hint of a criminal record and fit the profile of those the Trump administration claims it is targeting. However, there are numerous examples of how judges are struggling to free those who were improperly detained. At a court hearing in January, U.S. District Judge Eric C. Tostrud described the extreme strain he and his fellow judges feel as they are overwhelmed with litigation as a result of the massive law-enforcement operation and subsequent civil rights battles.

It took nine days for a judge to order the release in December of Khalid Badri Qorane, who fled Somalia scared that terrorists with the Al-Shabaab would torture him for refusing to join the Islamist group. Another judge moved just about as quickly to order the release of Ali Cumar, a young Somalian who had already been granted a special deferral in his immigration case after he crossed the southern border with his parents but was nonetheless grabbed by ICE agents — who “broke his window, forced him to the ground and kneeled on him.”

Through these court filings, NOTUS was able to identify and speak with nearly a dozen immigrants detained by agents in recent weeks in Minneapolis. All described squalid conditions, treatment they described as abusive and said the White House’s description of the deportation roundups as targeted criminal enforcement couldn’t be further from the truth. The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to detailed requests for comment.

Felix Garcia Cardoso said he was detained on Jan. 6 by masked men on his way to clear snow from 40 houses in Richfield, Minnesota. When he noticed one of the men was Hispanic, he spoke to him in Spanish.

“I’m almost 60. I’m only here to work. I could be your father. You’re about 25 or 26. You could be my son,” Garcia Cardoso recalled telling him.

He remembered the agent apologizing, saying it was his job.

“You could have gotten other work that’s more honest, so you wouldn’t feel like you’re arresting your own people,” Garcia Cardoso said he relayed back.

When he complained that the handcuffs were squeezed too tight and hurt his wrists, he no longer got a response. The armed men asked him for his legal status. When Garcia Cardoso said he wouldn’t talk without a lawyer, they whisked him to the Whipple Federal Building, put him on a plane within three hours and immediately flew him to what the federal government is calling “Camp East Montana” near El Paso, Texas.

“They don’t give you time to speak to a lawyer to have the opportunity to get bail and stay home. That’s why they move you so fast,” Garcia Cardoso told NOTUS from his latest stop, the Torrance County Detention Facility in New Mexico.

“We’re not terrorists or assassins. We come here to work, to progress this country. Never have I had any arrest in my 26 years here. This was the first time. I feel like I’ve never done anyone harm at any time,” he professed.

Jorge Cordoba, a fellow detainee who spoke to NOTUS from the privately run immigration prison, recalled how federal agents refused to acknowledge that he still has legal status to remain in the U.S. and work under the Obama administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.

Cordoba described how a law-enforcement vehicle trailed him as soon as he left home at around 4:30 a.m. on his way to work at the humidification-machine manufacturer Dristeem in Eden Prairie, Minnesota.

He told NOTUS the agents said, “We know you have DACA, but it’s expired.” But when he clarified that his DACA status is up for renewal in April, they arrested him anyway.

“They’re racial profiling people,” said Cordoba, who turns 34 this Sunday. Cordoba was released Feb. 7 after his attorney filed a lawsuit on his behalf and has reunited with his four children back in Minneapolis.

All the detainees who spoke to NOTUS described a chaotic process of agents rushing detainees out of Minnesota and into Texas, where they are then separated from family members who were arrested alongside them. Disagreements sometimes break out over the lack of food or scant time provided for phone calls, one detainee said. Another said guards occasionally stop distributing drinking water from pitchers and order them to drink from communal faucets — even though that water comes out “milky white, like watery paint, with a terrible odor.”

A third prisoner, who did not want to be identified by name out of fear that the government would retaliate against him while he waits behind bars, said he’d already signed paperwork electing to self-deport to Mexico so he could eventually reunite with his wife and two small children — who came here two years ago and had claimed asylum.

A fourth prisoner described having his hands and feet chained together on the four-hour bus drive north from El Paso to Estancia, New Mexico.

“We were all scared of getting into an accident and being unable to escape the bus — or even cover our heads,” he said.

That fourth prisoner, Julio Lopez Mendoza, said he fled to the United States in 2023 after he witnessed a murder at his uncle’s dance club in Ecuador, tackled the shooter and offered to help the prosecution — only to discover that the man was a well-connected mobster in a gang called “Los Choneros.” He found refuge in Minneapolis.

“I was living in peace and experiencing a calm I hadn’t felt in years — until the hell from ICE began,” he said.

Lopez Mendoza described being arrested alongside his fiancée outside the used-vehicle dealer where he was a mechanic, and being horrified at the conditions at the Whipple Federal Building in Minneapolis. He described 54 people crammed into a cell with only one working toilet that jammed. He said the urine flowed across the room to where he was laying his head on the floor.

“We couldn’t stay standing. We had to sleep, because our bodies couldn’t take it anymore,” he said, his voice straining. “It was horrible. It was disgusting. I felt like a pig.”

It only got worse when he came down with an unknown illness while at the sprawling East Montana detention camp in Texas, where he developed a cough, nose bleeds and his hands turned “all yellow.”

“I thought I’d die,” he said. “I felt like a prisoner of war. So many people were crying, begging for doctors. They treated us like criminals, assassins, as if we came here to invade and start a war. The guards treated us like we came here to damage this country. The looks they gave us, it was like an enemy planning to end your life.”