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. <\/p>\n
On a Friday afternoon in the middle of January, agents inside Immigrations and Customs Enforcement\u2019s Houston processing center told Andrea to come with them. They gave the young Venezuelan refugee the clothes she\u2019d been wearing when they detained her on the street outside her aunt\u2019s home in Minneapolis, days earlier. They gave her back her cellphone. They kept her driver\u2019s license. \u201cNo me dijeron nada ni a donde iba ni nada,\u201d she later told me as she recounted the story. \u201cThey didn\u2019t tell me anything, not where I was going or anything.\u201d<\/p>\n
Agents took her outside the facility and told her she was free. Andrea, who wouldn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019d 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\u2019s license, and her refugee visa gave her permission to work. She\u2019d been given the same reassurance from lawyers and advocates that many refugees have heard: If anyone was safe, it was her.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But upon returning to her car after visiting her aunt\u2014where she\u2019d spent a couple of hours holding the baby, so the new mom could shower, and unpacking food she\u2019d brought\u2014immigration agents approached and told her she was being detained. In fact, they\u2019d been following her all day, they told her. Andrea showed the agents her driver\u2019s license, which they took and kept. She told them she had more documents and offered to show them, but the agents were not interested. \u201cMe dijeron que los papeles que yo ten\u00eda no val\u00edan nada,\u201d Andrea told me. \u201cThey told me the papers I had were worthless.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\u2014like 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\u2014were 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<\/a>\u2014more than 200,000 people legally in the United States\u2014claiming 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.<\/p>\n 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. \u201cWe saw this huge spike in flights out of Minneapolis,\u201d said Savi Arvey, who leads the ICE Flight Monitor<\/a> 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.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWhy would Texas even allow this?\u201d 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\u2019t want to make them targets. He\u2019d 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n Over the past several years, Texas\u2019s leadership has cleared the way for Trump\u2019s mass-deportation operation\u2014both within communities and on state land leaders have offered as staging grounds. Land commissioner Dawn Buckingham told NewsNation\u2019s Ali Bradley<\/a> the administration could lay claim to any of the \u201cthirteen million acres across\u201d Texas for a new deportation center. \u201cWhatever it takes. We\u2019re here to be a good partner again, just getting these violent criminals who\u2019ve been hurting our sons and daughters off of our soil.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019s immigration agenda, saying that<\/a> those officers \u201chave been deputized to assist ICE, doing everything ICE would do such as apprehending, arresting, and deporting.\u201d<\/p>\n The federal district courts that preside over Texas\u2019s growing number of detention centers are notoriously reluctant to grant detainees\u2019 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\u2019s departments enter into agreements with ICE<\/a> in which local officers would be able to identify, process, and detain noncitizens, holding them in city and county jails on ICE\u2019s behalf.\u00a0<\/p>\n State leaders have also worked to dismantle Texas\u2019s network of faith-based aid groups that previously contracted with the federal government to help people in Andrea\u2019s 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>, a respite organization that serves immigrants in El Paso, claiming that the Catholic nonprofit was a \u201cstash house\u201d that was \u201charboring illegal aliens.\u201d Now Texas is a critical player in Operation PARRIS.<\/p>\n \u201cThey know they\u2019re not going to get any pushback from Abbott,\u201d 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<\/a> in a blue knit bunny hat and kindergarten-size backpack went viral and was used by elected officials to challenge DHS\u2019s narrative that it is targeting \u201cthe worst of the worst.\u201d In the days before Castro\u2019s arrival, protests broke out inside the detention center, with inmates chanting \u201cLibertad para los ni\u00f1os (freedom for the children).\u201d<\/p>\n Texas is home to more detainees than any other state\u2014by a lot. Before the enforcement surges, and the infrastructure expansions to support them, 21 detention centers in Texas held around 12,000 people<\/a>. 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\u2019s 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<\/a>, 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<\/a>, southeast of Dallas; it\u2019s also planning another facility east of El Paso, likely in Socorro<\/a>. These \u201cmega\u201d 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n