Update: Shortly after publication, a federal judge in Minnesota granted a temporary restraining order blocking the Department of Homeland Security and Immigrations and Customs Enforcement from arresting and detaining lawfully resettled refugees in Minnesota. The judge ordered that refugees detained in Minnesota be released immediately and those in Texas be released within five days.
On a Friday afternoon in the middle of January, agents inside Immigrations and Customs Enforcement’s Houston processing center told Andrea to come with them. They gave the young Venezuelan refugee the clothes she’d been wearing when they detained her on the street outside her aunt’s home in Minneapolis, days earlier. They gave her back her cellphone. They kept her driver’s license. “No me dijeron nada ni a donde iba ni nada,” she later told me as she recounted the story. “They didn’t tell me anything, not where I was going or anything.”
Agents took her outside the facility and told her she was free. Andrea, who wouldn’t use her full name because she feared being targeted, stood alone in the parking lot, near the airport in a city she had never even visited. She was still in disbelief that this had happened, and she had no idea what would happen next.
Had Andrea known this could occur, she might not have ventured out that day in Minneapolis; she knew about the surge of immigration officers in the city and the ensuing community actions. But her aunt had just had a baby. Andrea, a twentysomething who says her life revolves around her family, wanted to go and help. Plus, she knew she had one of the most secure legal statuses available. She’d been through extensive vetting, and the United States government had agreed that her situation in Venezuela qualified her for refugee status. She had a driver’s license, and her refugee visa gave her permission to work. She’d been given the same reassurance from lawyers and advocates that many refugees have heard: If anyone was safe, it was her.
But upon returning to her car after visiting her aunt—where she’d spent a couple of hours holding the baby, so the new mom could shower, and unpacking food she’d brought—immigration agents approached and told her she was being detained. In fact, they’d been following her all day, they told her. Andrea showed the agents her driver’s license, which they took and kept. She told them she had more documents and offered to show them, but the agents were not interested. “Me dijeron que los papeles que yo tenía no valían nada,” Andrea told me. “They told me the papers I had were worthless.”
For decades refugees have been shielded from immigration politics in the United States. They were not considered at risk of deportation by immigration lawyers and advocacy groups, even as the protections of other immigrants—like those who were brought to the U.S. as children and gained DACA status, or those with Temporary Protected Status because of conflicts or disasters in their home countries—were challenged or revoked. Refugee status was granted before applicants arrived in the country, after a thorough vetting process. While the first Trump administration moved to restrict new refugees from entering, lawyers and advocates assured those who were here that they were safe. Shortly before ICE ramped up its operations in Minneapolis late last year, the administration announced that the Department of Homeland Security would be reinterviewing the most recent arrivals—more than 200,000 people legally in the United States—claiming that they had not been properly vetted under the Biden administration. Then, on January 9, the DHS announced that the effort, dubbed Operation PARRIS (Post-Admission Refugee Reverification and Integrity Strengthening), would begin in Minnesota.
Andrea was detained just days later, among the first refugees taken from Minneapolis as part of the operation. Within days of the DHS announcement, the number of ICE flights arriving in Texas soared. “We saw this huge spike in flights out of Minneapolis,” said Savi Arvey, who leads the ICE Flight Monitor for the nonprofit Human Rights First. By and large, she said, the flights were bound for El Paso, with a few going to Houston. Before Trump took office, ICE typically flew around 2 flights per month out of Minneapolis, Arvey said. As deportation operations escalated in the fall, the number climbed to 11 per month. As of January 26, there have been 38 flights this month from Minnesota. Thirty of them came to Texas.
“Why would Texas even allow this?” one Minneapolis pastor asked me over the phone. He asked that I not use his name, because he leads one of the many churches in Minneapolis whose congregants are mostly refugees; he didn’t want to make them targets. He’d just flown to Houston to pick one of those members and drive him back up north. Like Andrea, his congregant had been released without his identification documents.
Over the past several years, Texas’s leadership has cleared the way for Trump’s mass-deportation operation—both within communities and on state land leaders have offered as staging grounds. Land commissioner Dawn Buckingham told NewsNation’s Ali Bradley the administration could lay claim to any of the “thirteen million acres across” Texas for a new deportation center. “Whatever it takes. We’re here to be a good partner again, just getting these violent criminals who’ve been hurting our sons and daughters off of our soil.”
In February, Governor Greg Abbott issued a statement touting the multibillion-dollar Operation Lone Star, which has deployed Department of Public Safety officers and Texas Army National Guard members to the border, as the vanguard of Trump’s immigration agenda, saying that those officers “have been deputized to assist ICE, doing everything ICE would do such as apprehending, arresting, and deporting.”
The federal district courts that preside over Texas’s growing number of detention centers are notoriously reluctant to grant detainees’ habeas petitions, which would allow release based on wrongful imprisonment or inhumane conditions. Last year, the state legislature passed a law mandating that some sheriff’s departments enter into agreements with ICE in which local officers would be able to identify, process, and detain noncitizens, holding them in city and county jails on ICE’s behalf.
State leaders have also worked to dismantle Texas’s network of faith-based aid groups that previously contracted with the federal government to help people in Andrea’s situation. Attorney General Ken Paxton demanded that Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley turn over documents and that its executive director, Sister Norma Pimentel, sit for a deposition. He ultimately filed suit against Annunciation House, a respite organization that serves immigrants in El Paso, claiming that the Catholic nonprofit was a “stash house” that was “harboring illegal aliens.” Now Texas is a critical player in Operation PARRIS.
“They know they’re not going to get any pushback from Abbott,” Congressman Joaquin Castro said in a phone interview ahead of his inspection of the family detention center in Dilley, south of San Antonio. Castro spoke to me while waiting for the go-ahead to inspect the center and check in on the five-year-old boy, Liam Conejo Ramos, who was taken with his father from Minneapolis. A photo of Conejo Ramos in a blue knit bunny hat and kindergarten-size backpack went viral and was used by elected officials to challenge DHS’s narrative that it is targeting “the worst of the worst.” In the days before Castro’s arrival, protests broke out inside the detention center, with inmates chanting “Libertad para los niños (freedom for the children).”
Texas is home to more detainees than any other state—by a lot. Before the enforcement surges, and the infrastructure expansions to support them, 21 detention centers in Texas held around 12,000 people. In 2025 the state added capacity for at least 7,000 more, in part by reopening the facility in Dilley, which had closed under the Biden administration. Watchdog groups had long raised concerns about poor conditions at the center, but the official reason given for its closing was high operation costs. In 2025, ICE’s detention budget grew from $4 billion to $14 billion with the passage of the Big Beautiful Bill, which also included $45 billion to expand detention capacity. In August, ICE opened a five-thousand-person-capacity tent city at Fort Bliss, in El Paso. And in December, it was reported that ICE had purchased a one-million-square-foot warehouse originally designed to be an Amazon shipping facility in Hutchins, southeast of Dallas; it’s also planning another facility east of El Paso, likely in Socorro. These “mega” centers will hold around 9,000 detainees each. And none of this is likely to be much of an investment in Texas. The two publicly traded companies that operate the majority of the detention centers, CoreCivic and the GEO Group, have headquarters near Nashville and Boca Raton, Florida, respectively.
If thousands of refugees are going to be detained for their reinterviews, Texas has the beds to hold them. But last week, a group of refugees represented by the International Refugee Assistance Project sued the Trump administration on behalf of refugees who have been or are likely to be detained under Operation PARRIS, saying that warrantless arrests and being held in detention without probable cause violate the refugees’ right to due process. “Even though immigration detention has grown enormously in scale over the decades, there are still limits to why the government can detain people,” said Kimberly Grano, an attorney with IRAP.
While she was in ICE custody in Houston, Andrea said, agents repeatedly asked if she wanted to waive her right to have a lawyer present during a reinterview. When she would not do it, she said, they left her for six hours to see if she would change her mind. She didn’t. The next day, after a twelve-hour wait, they asked her again. She again refused. At any point, she was told, she could sign a form agreeing to self-deport. “Ese es el propósito de ellos al tenerte ahí,” she said. “That’s their purpose in having you there.”
Lawyers and advocates say this type of treatment is legally unprecedented. Typically, a refugee returns to the DHS after one year in the U.S. to adjust their status to legal permanent resident, provided they have not committed a crime or left the country, and receive their green card. Now, lawyers claim, the federal government is detaining refugees at the one-year mark, holding them for indefinite periods, reinterviewing them, and taking the opportunity to see if they will self-deport. The administration claims it’s reexamining cases for fraud. Whether or not ICE is able to revoke refugees’ legal status, Grano said, the administration is “still going to be accomplishing their goal of scaring a lot of people.”
For many, that fear is familiar. In Venezuela, Andrea told me, her family didn’t have the right to a political opinion. They lived in fear that the government would pick them up and detain them in harsh conditions, as it did to more than two thousand political dissidents in 2024. What had happened to her under Operation PARRIS felt like what she’d feared would happen in Venezuela. “Si parece que ellos simplemente pueden ignorar mis derechos,” she said. “It seems like they can simply ignore my rights.”
IRAP lawyers estimate that more than one hundred refugees are currently being detained, most of them in Texas, and that the number will likely grow as Operation PARRIS continues. As the first wave of detainees were released, cellphones across Texas lit up. Friends of friends coordinated rides and opened guest rooms. Texas churches answered calls from pastors in Minneapolis. The persistent staff members and volunteers at migrant ministries in El Paso were put on alert.
Andrea didn’t have to stay in that Houston parking lot for long. She called her aunt in Minneapolis, the one she’d been visiting when she was detained. While she was in detention, her aunt had activated a string of friends and acquaintances that stretched from Minnesota to Texas. They found a family in town to take Andrea in until someone could fly down and drive her back, since she couldn’t fly without her ID. “Fueron unas personas super amables desde el inicio. Me sentí en confianza desde el segundo que los vi.” “[The Houstonians] were incredibly friendly people right from the start. I felt comfortable the second I saw them,” Andrea said. For the first time in a week, she said, she wasn’t scared.
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