‘ICE conveyor belt’ illegally detaining, moving Minnesota children to Texas faster than courts can respond
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Shortly after Elvis Joel Tipan Echeverria, a man from Ecuador with an open asylum case, pulled into the driveway of his Minneapolis home on Thursday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents broke a window in his car, pulled him and his 2-year-old daughter out and drove them away.
In less than eight hours, Echeverria and his daughter were on a commercial flight to a Texas family detention facility, even though a judge had ordered ICE to return the toddler to her Minnesota home.
“The court ordered the release of this child, and 20 minutes later they were put on a flight,” said Irina Vaynerman, whose organization, Groundwork Legal, is representing the man and his daughter.
The 2-year-old’s detention is part of an accelerating trend of what Vaynerman describes as ICE agents sending children and adults with legal immigration status out of state to avoid dealing with accountability from the federal court system.
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Vaynerman said she and her colleagues filed an emergency motion in federal court Friday, asking a judge to stop the practice.
“Minnesotans are being unlawfully detained and are then being quickly marshalled across state lines by the government,” Vaynerman said. “They’re doing that in order to evade the reach of the federal district court in Minnesota.”
“This is an intentional, calculated effort,” Vaynerman added, “Especially where folks are already being denied the access of counsel before they're placed on the planes.”
A ‘conveyor belt’ of illegally detained children
Echeverria’s 2-year-old daughter, identified in court documents only as C.R.T.V., was returned to Minnesota on Friday and is now with her mother. Her father is still in detention. But several lawyers told MPR News the trend of illegally detaining immigrants, including young children and shipping them out of state has been widespread.
Early on Thursday morning, Maria Velasco Hurtado was being driven to work by a neighbor when the vehicle she was in was stopped by ICE officers. According to her attorney, Velasco Hurtado tried to show the agents papers proving her legal permission to be in the United States.
But the agents removed her from the car, drove to her home in Hopkins and, according to her lawyer, used her as “bait” to detain the rest of the family, including two children in first and seventh grade.
“They made her, on her cell phone, call her husband and tell them what was going on. He (the husband) kind of opened the door to see what was going on, and an ICE agent stuck his foot in to stop the door from being able to be closed,” said Brian Clark, Velasco Hurtado’s attorney.
Clark said the entire family was put on a flight to Texas within a few hours despite a federal judge ruling that the family be kept in Minnesota.
According to Clark and several other lawyers MPR News spoke to, what’s happened to these children and their families is part of a “conveyor belt” strategy that is illegally detaining immigrants in Minnesota en masse and moving them out of state beyond the reach of legal counsel.
“They flood the zone with all these arrests,” Clark said. “All the tactics towards protesters, and then people are just missing the biggest thing (which) is this conveyor belt where they’re just arresting people without legal basis, and moving them.”
‘It’s immoral and it’s also illegal’
The Hopkins family of four is now back in their Minnesota home after spending a brief stint in an ICE family detention facility in Dilley, Texas. Their children plan to return to their elementary school this week.
Clark worries that many more children and families will be unable to access legal help.
“They (federal authorities) just figure, how many can you get out?” he said, estimating that 80 percent don’t get an attorney. “They just keep that conveyor belt chugging and get them out of the country illegally. That’s not American. It’s immoral, and it’s also illegal.”
In Columbia Heights, Erika Ramos, the mother of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, said her son and husband, Adrian Conejo Arias, are still detained at the Dilley family detention center, where she’s worried about Liam’s deteriorating health.
“The situation of my husband Adrian and my son Liam inside the detention center is deeply concerning,” Ramos told MPR News on Monday. “Liam is getting sick because the food they receive is not of good quality. He has stomach pain, he’s vomiting, he has a fever and he no longer wants to eat.”
Eyewitnesses who saw Liam’s detention told MPR News it happened so quickly that ICE agents were already gone, leaving Conejo Arias’ car still running in the driveway before local law enforcement could arrive.
Marc Prokosch, a lawyer representing the family, said they entered the U.S. legally —contradicting an ICE official’s claim they crossed the border illegally as a “family unit.”
Prokosch said the parents have no criminal record in the state and no order of deportation. He also said their removal from Minnesota happened so quickly, he had been unable to determine their exact location a full day after they’d been detained.
“We have clients that once they’re picked up, they’re whisked away to the airport literally within hours. And so that’s (what happened), to the best of our knowledge. They’re in a family holding cell (in Texas now),” Prokosch said.
For Prokosch, like many other lawyers, ICE tactics being deployed in Minnesota seem designed to evade the law.
“That’s intentional,” Prokosch said. “Since Metro Surge came, they’ve been moving them all out to Texas … within 24 hours. That’s one of the core elements of being able to help somebody in the legal sphere, is to be able to communicate with them … it’s really hard to talk to them.”
‘We’re not releasing you’
Sam Doiron is a supervising attorney at RAICES, a Texas-based organization that provides legal services to immigrants. Many of the people she’s representing are currently detained at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, meant to house families in Texas.
The number of families she’s representing from Minnesota has grown in recent weeks. But she doesn’t know how many children from the state are being held at Dilley currently.
ICE has not responded to an inquiry from MPR News about how many children from Minnesota are detained at Dilley currently. Nor has it responded to other MPR News questions regarding its actions lawyers say are illegal.
The Department of Homeland Security has said that all its immigration enforcement actions are legal and they do all they can to keep families together.
“Every single action that our ICE officers take is according to the law and following protocols that we have used for years,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem told reporters recently. “They are doing everything correctly.”
In the case of Liam Conejo Ramos, “my officers did everything they could to reunite him with his family,” Marcos Charles, leader of ICE’s enforcement and removal operations, told reporters earlier this week as ICE pushed back against criticisms of how they detained Liam and his father.
ICE agents, said Charles, “have children of their own. They sacrifice everything for their families.”
Doiron said ICE’s practices of detaining children and families have changed dramatically since President Donald Trump took office in January 2025.
“Before when families were detained, it was primarily people who were newly entering the United States, and they would be detained and processed and then usually released,” Doiron said.
“Now what we’re seeing is a lot of interior apprehensions — people being detained at ICE check-ins, people being detained at immigration court, just out and about, having a regular day, being detained,” Doiron added.
Many of these families have pathways to legal residency, according to Doiron but now, unlike in past administrations, they’re being held in immigration detention instead of being released.
In many cases, she said, their detentions violate the Flores Settlement, a nearly 30-year-old agreement that outlines basic requirements of the federal government for detaining children, including the right to safe and sanitary conditions. It also forbids detaining children for more than 20 days.
“ICE is blatantly ignoring the Flores settlement,” Doiron said. “Now we’re seeing multiple families who have been there for over 100 days.”
She’s also had clients tell her they’ve been served dirty water and received abysmal medical treatment at Dilley.
One of Clark’s clients who is pregnant said staff at Dilley could not find an OB-GYN for her while she was detained there and needed medical care for her pregnancy.
Doiron believes, according to conversations she’s had with clients at the Dilley facility, that recent footage of detainees protesting at the center is that of children and families who have been detained there long-term.
“We had clients who told us that ICE rounded up some families in Dilley and … sat them all down and told them, ‘We’re not releasing you because the Flores Settlement is dead and has been for a few months,’” Doiron said. “That’s not true. We do know that officers in detention centers lie to our clients a lot.”
Doiron is also concerned about the pace at which ICE is sending people out of Minnesota and the agency’s failure to give detainees required access to an attorney.
“When someone is detained, ICE is obligated to give them a list of pro bono attorneys in the area, and they’re obligated to tell people that they can make legal calls for free. We’ve had multiple families tell us that they didn’t receive the list and they didn’t know that they could make calls,” Doiron said.
“There’s no way to really tell how many are not getting access to legal services, but that’s definitely something that’s happening.”
‘Flooding the zone’ with arrests
Many of the lawyers currently working to represent illegally detained immigrant families and children in Minnesota, and many of the judges ruling on their cases, are working far outside their normal expertise.
A courtroom deputy from the chambers of Minnesota Federal Judge Patrick Schiltz told MPR News that Minnesota has called in four additional federal judges from Missouri, Nebraska, Iowa and North Dakota to help handle legal challenges tied to immigrant detentions that are flooding Minnesota courts.
In an order released Monday, Judge Schiltz said ICE is refusing to comply with dozens of his court’s rulings. He ordered acting ICE director Todd Lyons to appear in court personally on Friday to answer why he shouldn’t be held in contempt, writing, “The court’s patience is at an end.”
According to court records, at least 422 habeas corpus petitions have been submitted in Minnesota since Jan. 5 when Noem announced an escalation to the ongoing Twin Cities immigration enforcement surge.
Brian Clark, who represents Maria Velasco Vertado’s family of four from Hopkins, has submitted several of those habeas petitions in the last nine days.
He is an antitrust lawyer. He and hundreds of other private Minnesota attorneys received emergency training in immigration law 11 days ago and have been filing paperwork to help illegally detained children and families.
“We’re all talking to each other, we’re all trying to help each other, because I think a lot of us view it as we take our oath to uphold the Constitution as attorneys,” Clark said. “We’ve got to step up when the rule of law is not being followed, and that is precisely what’s happening here.”
In several of his Minnesota cases, Clark has worked with federal judges outside of Minnesota, including one from Nebraska and another from Iowa. He believes the surge of immigration enforcement is overwhelming the court system.
“These are our main federal judges, and they are so busy … they’re now pulling in federal district court judges from all over the circuit, if not other districts,” Clark said.
Homeland Security is “flooding the zone” with arrests “that they have to know are generally not constitutional and not lawful,” Clark said.
“We can’t get to all these arrests, and they know, if they move fast enough, fly them out within hours to Texas, we won’t even know about the existence of everybody,” he added. “So even if we catch hundreds with our efforts, thousands are going to get through.”
Clark believes ICE operations are driven by numbers. “They know these aren't legal detentions, but they’re doing it anyways, because if they act fast enough, enough people get deported, and they can report on the numbers of people getting deported in the press.”
Irina Vaynerman, the attorney who represented the two year old ICE sent to Texas last week, wants to stop the practice of quickly moving detained immigrants out of Minnesota.
“Swaths of Minnesotans are being unlawfully detained then they are being quickly ushered across state lines in order to avoid the reach of the federal district court here in Minnesota,” she said. “I have never seen anything like this to the extent and depravity that we are seeing right now.”
MPR News reporter Matt Sepic contributed to this report.
