On Tuesday morning, a Venezuelan couple came to Jane Graupman’s office sobbing over the unknown fate of their 20-year-old son, who had been taken away by masked federal agents.
“They were getting ready for work, and all of a sudden their house was surrounded by men with drawn guns saying, ‘Oh, it’s OK. It’s just some paperwork that needs to be fixed. Just open the door,’” said Graupman, executive director of the International Institute of Minnesota.
The mother did as she was told, and her 20-year-old son was immediately removed from the home, the latest in a growing number of planned detentions involving recent immigrants with lawful refugee status who have applied for but not yet received their permanent residency, otherwise known as their Green Cards.
Before long, Graupman said a distraught Sudanese family arrived at the International Institute with a similar story — their son was gone.
Transported to Texas
The refugees are quickly transported to the Whipple Federal Building at Fort Snelling, “and within 24 hours, they’re taking them to Texas, with no due process, no access to an attorney, and no clarification of what’s going on,” Graupman said.
Graupman, whose St. Paul-based nonprofit helps resettle refugees in Minnesota, received an explanatory memo on the matter from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security less than a week ago. DHS, it said, is “reexamining” the refugee status of 5,600 Minnesotans who have entered the country legally but have not yet been granted their Green Cards, which provide proof of permanent residency for non-citizens.
The pipeline cases, according to the memo, will be put through “vetting enhancements,” including fresh background checks, re-interviews and merit reviews — all part of Operation PARRIS, or “Post-Admission Refugee Reverification and Integrity Strengthening,” an offshoot of the federal fraud investigations that got underway last year in Minnesota.
The memo says Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, will be heavily involved in the process, but it makes no specific mention of planned arrests. Another Twin Cities-based nonprofit, the Advocates for Human Rights in Minneapolis, estimated that as of early this past week at least 100 people had been detained.
“Minnesota is ground zero for the war on fraud,” reads the Jan. 9 memo from DHS. “This operation in Minnesota demonstrates that the Trump administration will not stand idly by as the U.S. immigration system is weaponized by those seeking to defraud the American people. American citizens and the rule of law come first, always.”
The efforts build on a presidential executive order issued last January and a presidential proclamation from last June that require federal agencies “to identify and implement new vetting enhancements to safeguard the nation from foreign terrorists and other public safety threats.”
‘They took my son, they took my husband’
How Operation PARRIS has played out this past week for clients of the International Institute, Graupman said, has been nothing short of terrifying, with no evident focus to her on any one ethnicity or particular country of origin. Despite the stated goal of keeping Americans safe, criminal history, or the lack thereof, appears irrelevant, she said.
“Today we’ve probably had a dozen families that have been impacted by this,” said Graupman on Tuesday. “We’ve had people walk in all week, and they say, ‘they took my son, they took my husband.’ It started this weekend.”
The target — 5,600 Green Card applicants — roughly reflects the number of refugee arrivals in Minnesota in the past three years, Graupman said, and those individuals have already been through a gauntlet of some 14 to 15 health and background checks to enter the country.
“They’re inferring that they’re fraudulent applications, but I have a hard time believing that because of the thorough screening that people go through to get here,” Graupman said. “They have biometric scanning, DHS checks, FBI checks, USCIS checks. The checks go on and on and on.”
She added: “These are people here with legal status. What the common denominator seems to be with all these families is they haven’t been in the country that long. The Trump administration has a list of 40 countries they’re not processing Green Card applications for. They’re on pause.”
Growing restrictions
Those restrictions are growing. The Trump administration announced this past week that it would suspend immigrant visas from 75 countries, including Afghanistan, Iran, Russia and Somalia, beginning Jan. 21.
In an interview Wednesday, a woman who has been living in Minneapolis since civil war reignited in her home country of Sudan in 2023 said ICE agents came to her parking lot on Friday and photographed her car. Five agents returned Monday and stationed themselves at her front door, back door and window, asking to be let in.
The woman, who said she has been trying to fix a typo showing an erroneous date of entry to the U.S. on her Green Card, declined to open the door and demanded to see a warrant signed by a judge. After repeating their demands, the agents said they would return.
“We were so scared because we were at home and the kids are at school,” said the woman, who lives with her brother’s family, including four children. “If something happened to us, we don’t know what would happen to the kids.”
Ethnic Karen refugees living in fear
George Thawmoo, a co-chair of the Karen Organization of Minnesota, said there’s a number of reasons why refugees might not apply for a Green Card within a year of arriving in the U.S., as required by immigration law, or might fail to file to get their Green Card renewed. Some immigrants are simply overwhelmed by the experience of moving to a new country, they’ve lost supporting paperwork, or they fear and don’t understand the system.
Those issues amount to paperwork errors that could be easily be corrected, he said, and have nothing to do with national security.
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He said ICE agents removed an ethnic Karen man from a laundromat and transported him to federal detention. They followed another Karen man home from a son’s haircut appointment on Saturday and gained entry into his apartment complex in St. Paul, where they asked to interview his wife, a mother of four children who has lived in the U.S. since 2024.
Shortly after the man let them in, she was detained and flown out of state for processing. She leaves behind a 4-month-old baby, and clearly not by choice, he said.
“She’s in Houston now,” Thawmoo said.
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