Federal judge temporarily blocks Trump administration from detaining Minnesota refugees

A federal judge has temporarily blocked the Trump administration from carrying out arrests and detentions of refugees.

The lawsuit says refugees have been subject to an "official policy of warrantless and often violent seizures."

"And these individuals are being arrested from their homes, from their workplaces, on the street, and then being transferred very quickly to detention centers on the other side of the country, in Texas," said Stephanie Gee, senior director of U.S. legal services at IRAP, one of the groups behind the suit.

As the lawsuit notes, the arrests come after Homeland Security announced it would be targeting up to 5,600 refugees throughout the state.

Gee says at least 100 have been sent to immigration detention centers so far, and arrests have so far been confined to Minnesota.

"However, we have no reason to believe that ICE is not planning to expand this operation to other states and we do expect that this kind of campaign could occur really in any state or city in this county if the agency is not stopped," she said.

The new ruling temporarily bars refugee arrests from continuing as the case progresses, and requires those already detained to be released.

Gee says refugees who've already been legally processed into the U.S. are supposed to be protected by specific U.S. legal procedures that shield them from deportation and removal.

But late last year, the Trump administration announced it would be reviewing and re-vetting potentially hundreds of thousands of refugees. Gee says that means rather than being entered into immigration proceedings, like other ICE detainees, refugees taken into custody this month are now undergoing intensive interviews inside ICE detention.

"What we’re seeing happen when refugees are detained is that many of them are being scheduled and put through these re-interviews in detention by immigration officials who are asking them about their histories, their cases, why they left their home countries," she said. "They’re really asking them to revisit things that they’ve already been interviewed on, for hours, years before now, when they were in the process to come here."

A spokesperson with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services called the ruling "another lawless and activist order from the federal judiciary" and said the administration was conducting an anti-fraud operation in Minnesota. DHS did not respond to questions about how many refugees were taken into custody or on what charges or legal grounds they were being held.