James was scared to go outside.
He’d known the fear of hiding before. James, whose full name is being withheld for his safety, had fled the military dictatorship in Burma, also known as Myanmar. He slept with his family in jungles until they made it to a town on the border with Thailand, and then to a refugee camp.
James waited 18 years in that refugee camp, where he led three churches and a ministry for children separated from their families. He finally won authorization to come to the United States as a legal refugee with his family. They underwent extensive interviewing and vetting by the United Nations, as well as the US Departments of State and Homeland Security.
James and his family finally arrived in the Twin Cities a little over a year ago and were met at the Minneapolis airport by local Christians bearing flower necklaces and smiles. A local Anglican congregation in St. Paul, Church of the Redeemer, had agreed to sponsor his family, committing to helping him settle.
“We were so happy,” James told CT through an interpreter. Part of the Karen minority in Burma, a persecuted group made up of many Christians, James knew other Karen Christians from the refugee camp who had also come to in the Twin Cities.
“When I first came, I thought the US is the best place, and a safe place,” he said.
But now, just meeting in person with a reporter for an interview put James at risk. Immigration agents were arresting legal refugees in his neighborhood and on streets and inside homes around Minnesota, as part of what the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) calls Operation PARRIS.
PARRIS aims to reexamine the cases of all refugees who entered the country and have not yet obtained green cards. Refugees, who are among the most-vetted immigrants to the United States, are required to apply for green cards a year after arrival—even though the Trump administration temporarily stopped processing green cards for many refugees last year.
It’s a “Kafkaesque” situation, said Matthew Soerens, vice president of advocacy and policy for World Relief, an evangelical nonprofit and federal refugee resettlement agency. The organization estimates that roughly 17,000 refugees in its network could be subject to reexamination.
The PARRIS rollout was chaotic, and advocates say it deprived refugees of due process. Local aid groups told CT that refugees were not informed of why they were being arrested and were often transferred within a few hours to detention centers in Texas.
Minnesota churches and a local evangelical refugee resettlement agency scrambled to help amid a new and unpredictable crisis. They sought immigration lawyers for people who had never needed lawyers before. They delivered food to families in hiding at their homes who had never needed food before. They organized services of prayer and fasting and took flights and road trips to Texas to pick up detainees who were released without documents or identification.
One Karen Christian refugee, a nursing mother, was arrested on January 10 without warning and separated from her 5-month-old baby. ICE agents had asked her and her husband for identification, entering their apartment. The agents arrested the mother, leaving her husband with the baby and two other children, according to court documents. Records show the woman had applied for a green card within the government-required time frame.
After the arrest, Lah, a Karen Baptist woman who goes to church with the refugee who was arrested and is well-known in the Karen community, went with friends to the Whipple Building, the federal facility in Minneapolis where immigrants are being detained. They thought the arrest was a mistake.
But Lah, whose last name CT is withholding to protect the refugees she works with, said no one would talk to them—it was the weekend. So they returned on Monday, only to find the woman had been transferred to Texas. Lah connected with a Karen friend in Texas who visited the woman, reassuring her that the church community would take care of her family.
“If you arrest criminal people, I’m not going to say anything,” said Lah, who came to the US years ago as a refugee and imagines how scary these experiences are for newcomers who often don’t understand English. “Right now I just feel angry. … They can do a better job.”
In late January, Judge Michael J. Davis ordered the woman’s release and return to Minnesota, calling the separation of the nursing baby and mother “particularly craven.”
The Karen community, according to local Karen Christians, was largely supportive of President Donald Trump over social issues like abortion. Now, PARRIS has placed heavy demands on them and on local churches and ministries that support them.
“All of a sudden, these ICE activities are going on and we have to find lawyers and we are not prepared. And lawyers cost so much money,” said Chi, another local Karen Christian who requested his last name be withheld to protect the refugees around him.
For Arrive Ministries, a local Christian refugee resettlement agency, the chaos began on January 10, a day after the government quietly announced the start of Operation PARRIS. The ministry received a call from one of its refugee clients, who said a family member hadn’t come home from work. Arrive staff checked federal records online—all refugees have a government-issued A-Number for identification—and saw that the person had been detained.
Arrive staff initially thought federal immigration agents had made a mistake, since refugees are lawfully present in the United States. When they went to the Whipple Building with paperwork to show their client was a refugee, they were refused entry.
Other refugee clients began calling Arrive in fear and confusion. Could their children go to school? How long was this going to last? In some instances, Arrive learned of arrests only when clients called from detention centers.
“Many of them are asking if there is something they’ve done wrong, or [are in] confusion over what they need to do now to continue to follow the law,” Arrive’s executive director of programs Rebekah Phillips said in an interview 10 days after the arrests began.
By that point, 20 of Arrive’s clients had been arrested, and the ministry—which shares a building with other evangelical organizations including a pregnancy resource center and a post-incarceration reentry program—locked its doors for safety from potential entry by federal agents.
Arrive clients were transferred, sometimes within hours, to various detention facilities in Texas. Ministries and other immigrant groups across Minnesota began working with lawyers to file habeas corpus petitions, a legal tool that prevents detainees from being moved to other jurisdictions—so long as it is filed while the individual is still in the state.
Two Anglican congregations, St. John’s Karen Anglican and Church of the Redeemer, set up a phone tree for an emergency call line to a law office to prepare. If a refugee was arrested, the churches could immediately have a lawyer file a habeas petition, according to Church of the Redeemer’s rector, Paul Calvin.
But everyone was making plans on the fly, without information. Even Arrive staff hadn’t heard anything from their federal partners about PARRIS. The ministry initially advised its clients—any refugees who came to the country in the last four years—to stay home. And not just at home but inside, unless there was a critical need like a doctor’s appointment. They told refugees not to let anyone inside without a signed warrant.
Weeks stuck inside left James feeling depressed and lonely—not being able to work, go to church, or visit other homes. Recently, when his cousin came and knocked on his door, James thought it was an ICE agent and was shaking the rest of the day.
But he recounted his story to CT with belly laughs. James and two other Karen Christians sitting with him said this is the Karen way: They have had so many troubles that, when a Karen tells a difficult story, they laugh through it. “It’s just a tradition,” Chi said.
One Bible verse James is clinging to right now is Psalm 118:8: “It is better to take refuge in the Lord than to trust in humans.” His fellow church members at St. John’s have fasted and prayed about the situation.
They’ve also received support from Church of the Redeemer—a congregation they join each year for an Ascension Day picnic that also sponsored James’s resettlement.
Calvin, the church’s rector, wrote a letter for James to carry in case he was detained, since his English is limited. The letter explains James’s status as a lawful refugee and reminds any would-be reader of his legal rights.
“As devoted citizens of the United States, we are confident that [James], his family and all other refugees will be afforded full and fair due process under the law,” Calvin wrote in the letter, which includes his phone number and signatures from other congregants. “As faithful followers of Jesus Christ, we pray that [James], his family and all other immigrants and refugees will be treated humanely as fellow image-bearers of God.”
Lawyers say the arrests of refugees are an unprecedented interpretation of US immigration law. Unlike asylum seekers, refugees come only come at the invitation of the United States and are vetted long before arrival.
To justify the arrests, DHS appears to be relying on a section of US immigration law that says refugees should return to DHS for “examination and inspection” if they don’t have their green card within a year of arrival.
But “there’s just no legal foundation for [detention],” said Robyn Brown, World Relief’s director of immigration programs, who is also a lawyer. “Never before have individuals just been taken from their homes, detained, flown out of state for examination and inspection.”
Brown said the arrests also create unnecessary costs to taxpayers, since refugees could simply be scheduled for interviews at immigration offices in Minneapolis. There should be no grounds for deportation unless a refugee has committed a crime in the United States or is found to have committed immigration fraud, Brown said.
Soerens, also at World Relief, said DHS can run background checks anytime it wants. Refugees don’t need to be present—the agency already has their biometric data and biographic records.
“What they’re proposing is, ‘We’re going to reopen the question of if they qualified legally as a refugee in the first place,’” Soerens said, even though these refugees spent years being vetted by both international and domestic agencies.
Refugees told Arrive that for their re-interviews in detention, they were placed in handcuffs or other physical restraints. Phillips, the codirector, said some refugees were not offered access to counsel or “appropriate language interpretation,” violating their due process rights.
Other refugees received letters directing them to an office to be re-interviewed, according to Phillips. But when they showed up for their appointments, some were immediately detained and put in physical restraints.
ICE did not respond to questions from CT about the arrests or alleged violations of due process.
A federal district judge has temporarily halted refugee arrests in Minnesota, but that order could change at any moment. In early February, the government appealed the restraining order. Refugees outside of Minnesota, not subject to the order, might also be at risk because DHS indicated its reexamination would start with Minnesota and then expand.
After the judge’s order, Phillips said Arrive has slowly seen clients return home, even as she said some refugees remained in detention beyond the judge’s deadline for release. (On Feb. 9, the judge in the case asked the government to provide an update on the release of the refugees.) They still don’t know just how many of their refugee clients were arrested. Arrive often wouldn’t know where or when a refugee was released until they called—from Houston, El Paso, and San Antonio.
Adding to the bitterness, refugees have been released without their documents, like driver’s licenses or work authorization, according to Phillips. She is getting questions from refugees about whether they can drive their cars.
World Relief said most of the refugees detained through its partners in Minnesota are Christians. The Twin Cities have a strong presence of Christian refugees—from Hmong communities, Karen communities from Burma, and others.
These refugees are often newer to the Twin Cities than other refugee groups, such as Somalis. And they are there in part because of historic ties to Minnesota churches.
Many from Myanmar’s minority Christian community are Baptist because of Baptist missionaries who came to them in the 19th century. One of them was Ola Hanson, ordained by the First Swedish Baptist Church of Minneapolis that is today Bethlehem Baptist Church.
Many Hmong churches in the Twin Cities are part of the Christian and Missionary Alliance, whose missionaries spread Christianity to the Hmong people in Laos in the 20th century.
DHS has also been summoning refugees for re-interviews by letter, sometimes giving very little notice to appear at a local federal office. Instead of the required 30 days’ notice, some refugees are being notified only 3 to 10 days in advance, Phillips said. If refugees receive a letter, Arrive advises them to consult with lawyers about their particular cases.
Refugees in Minnesota are still hiding, often afraid to go to their immigration appointments.
“They want to take the action steps required of them, but they have a lot of fear around their safety and what will take place if they do,” Phillips said.
There’s “a collapse of trust in enforcement,” said Calvin, the rector of Church of the Redeemer, talking over coffee at a Vietnamese bakery near his church. “How do you restore that?”
Even now, he added, as ICE drops off letters summoning refugees to appointments, the government can’t expect people to trust that they’re walking into a straightforward interview and not a detention, as happened to some of Arrive’s clients.
A general anxiety hangs over Calvin’s congregation, too. A Liberian American congregant carries his passport everywhere with him. Raids have happened near the church, often announced by the whistles of observers.
Calvin hasn’t gone to any protests. Instead, he tries to focus on helping people in his relational network.
“It’s very difficult pastorally,” he said, addressing so many sensitive and life-altering situations at once and learning about things like filing habeas petitions.
The treatment of refugees is “crossing a red line” even for some conservative congregations outside the Twin Cities metro area, said Carl Nelson, who heads up Transform Minnesota, an umbrella organization for the state’s evangelical churches and nonprofits.
Local churches have personal connections to refugees. Many have formed yearslong relationships through the official resettlement process, where churches often commit to supporting refugee families in their first year in the States.
The Sunday after Operation PARRIS began, a local pastor heard about the refugee arrests and asked Nelson to confirm if it was really happening. Nelson did, and the pastor invited him to talk about it in their church service. Afterward, people came up to him to ask if that was really happening.
With other immigration enforcement going on, “they can keep a distance from it, and when they see this, they’re all of a sudden taking notice,” he said.
“This is a simple one. This is wrong. It just it needs to stop,” Nelson said. “The way that it’s being done is clearly inhumane. It’s inefficient. It really doesn’t achieve any of the stated goals, [one of which is] to try and seek out fraud. It’s just terrorizing a group of people.”
Nelson said more churches around the country need to prepare for supporting refugees in their networks who might be detained. Local churches are also discussing if congregants can accompany refugees to re-interviews as support.
James is waiting to see what happens with his case. His green card is pending.
I asked him: Are you angry at God about all of this?
“I’m not angry at God,” he said. “Because Jesus himself, when he came on earth, he had to go through worse than this. … He also commanded us that we have to go through trouble while we live in this world, and we will have peace in afterlife. And that’s why I’m not mad at God. I don’t blame anybody, because there’s the good example that Jesus set for us. He wants us to live that way.”
He compared himself to a baby learning to walk after being in the United States only one year. “I cannot stand up on my own feet. So to be able to stand on my own feet, to serve God, to serve other people, I need people to pray for me.”
– With reporting from Andy Olsen
