Civil rights advocates are protesting the arrests of lawfully resettled refugees as part of the Trump administration’s widening mass detention and deportation campaign.
Federal immigration agents have arrested dozens of refugees who were cleared by extensive security screenings before being resettled in Minnesota, The New York Times reported.
“The arrests of the refugees, who are mainly from Somalia and include children, come after an announcement last Friday that the Trump administration would ‘re-examine thousands of refugee cases through new background checks,’ focusing on people who have yet to obtain Green Cards after arriving in the United States.”
Most of the approximately 100 refugees detained so far have been transferred to detention centers in Texas, the Times report added.
The federal action comes amid heightened scrutiny and protests over the administration’s surge of Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel in Minnesota and agents’ use of increasingly deadly force against protesters, bystanders and immigrants.
According to the Department of Homeland Security, the arrests are part of Operation PARRIS, an anacronym for “Post-Admission Refugee Reverification and Integrity Strengthening.”
“Minnesota is ground zero for the war on fraud,” DHS claimed
“Minnesota is ground zero for the war on fraud,” DHS claimed without defining the nature of the fraud or who committed it. “This operation in Minnesota demonstrates that the Trump administration will not stand idly by as the U.S. immigration system is weaponized by those seeking to defraud the American people.”
The operation’s initial focus is on 5,600 refugees who have yet to attain permanent resident status, which is guaranteed as a condition of resettlement. The operation followed a December announcement that DHS will re-evaluate the legal status of more than 200,000 refugees resettled across the country during the Biden administration.
This operation and other controversial enforcement tactics stem from an executive order President Donald Trump signed day one of his current term denouncing refugee resettlement as a threat to national security. He has since dropped annual refugee admissions to a record low of 7,500 and vowed to allocate most of those slots to white South Africans.
The operation adds yet another layer of oppression to the president’s widening attacks on legal immigration, according to proponents of refugee resettlement.
Krish O’Mara Vignarajah
“By reopening settled refugee cases and treating lawful residents as perpetual suspects, the administration is deliberately injecting fear and instability into communities that have already been subjected to extraordinary trauma,” said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president of Global Refuge.
“Arresting them months or years later, often because their Green Card applications are stalled by government backlogs, is not about security or integrity. It is about rewriting the rules after the fact and making families pay the price for a system the administration itself has frozen.”
The administration’s campaign against Somali refugees in Minnesota, coupled with the termination of Temporary Protected Status for other Somalis, stigmatizes that population while doing nothing to protect the nation from dangerous immigrants, O’Mara Vignarajah said.
“If the administration has concerns about fraud, the answer is precision and due process, not dragnet enforcement that ensnares children, parents and long-standing community members. A government that terrorizes refugee families to score a political point is revealing a profound moral collapse, not a commitment to the law.”
Myal Greene
World Relief also condemned the operation, including the tactic of luring people from their homes to detain them and transport them out of state.
“This is a five-alarm fire,” World Relief President Myal Greene said. “These are not the ‘worst of the worst,’ these are innocent children and families who fled the worst wars and persecution imaginable, who were invited by the American people to become Americans under the terms of American law.”
Greene noted that each of the dozen refugees rounded up so far had been lawfully admitted through the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program authorized by Congress and only after undergoing extensive background checks overseas.
“This shameful and unpatriotic operation preys on our basest fears and manipulates the truth. Enough. ICE must be held accountable, and this operation must cease,” he said.