ICE Dumped Minnesota Detainees in Texas Desert Camps. Local Advocates Scrambled to Find Them.

The Pipeline to Nowhere

When federal immigration agents flooded Minnesota this winter for Operation Metro Surge, the arrests were just the beginning. ICE loaded detainees onto planes bound for Texas—thousands of miles from their families, their lawyers, and anyone who could help them.

In El Paso, Marisa Limon Garza's phone started ringing. Attorneys, relatives, friends of friends—all asking the same desperate question: Can you find my person? Can you prove they're still alive?

"Literally proof of life," said Garza, executive director of Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center. "That's what people were asking for."

ICE has long shuttled detainees across state lines, but Operation Metro Surge turned a trickle into a flood. A Sahan Journal analysis in December found that Minnesota detainees were being transferred out of state faster than ever before—a deliberate strategy to sever their connections to legal counsel and community support.

Texas became the dumping ground. The state already holds more ICE detention centers than anywhere else in the country—26 facilities, including Camp East Montana at Fort Bliss, a sprawling tent city with capacity for 5,000 people. It is now the largest immigration detention facility in America.

For families and lawyers in Minnesota trying to navigate this system from hundreds of miles away, it became a black box.

Death and Denial of Access

On January 6, ICE arrested Victor Manuel Diaz, a cook at a restaurant in Coon Rapids, Minnesota. A week later, he was dead at Camp East Montana. ICE claimed suicide. His family got a phone call.

After Diaz's death, ICE locked down visitor access to the camp. Families from Minnesota who had traveled to Texas were turned away at the gate. No explanation. No timeline for when access would resume.

"There was no rhyme or reason given for the restriction," said Imelda Maynard, legal services director at Estrella del Paso, a local advocacy group.

While families were barred, lawyers from Texas organizations were still allowed inside. They became the only eyes and ears for people desperate to know if their loved ones were alive, sick, or being deported without notice.

The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to requests for comment on how many Minnesotans remain detained at Camp East Montana, how long the visitor restrictions lasted, or why families were denied access after Diaz's death.

An Emergency Network Takes Shape

Texas immigrant advocates were not prepared to become a national support system. But as calls poured in from Minnesota, they mobilized.

Las Americas, Estrella del Paso, the Texas Civil Rights Project, and Annunciation House—an immigrant shelter in El Paso—coordinated to track down detainees, relay messages to families, and help released detainees get home.

Daniel Hatoum, a senior supervising attorney at the Texas Civil Rights Project, described navigating Camp East Montana from outside the system as "damn near impossible." His team trained Minnesota legal teams on filing habeas corpus petitions, shared intelligence on detention center procedures, and helped volunteers communicate with detainees when families could not.

"I get questions daily still for people who were arrested in Minnesota," Hatoum said. "'How can we make this come to light? What steps can we take to get this case moving? These are the medical issues my clients face—how does the court respond to these?'"

At Estrella del Paso, Maynard's team fielded repeated requests to help detainees who had been released in Texas with no identification, no money, and no way to get home. Many ended up at Annunciation House, where staff arranged travel back to Minnesota.

"We essentially dug in and relied on our community partnerships to try and just sort of triage initially," Maynard said.

Last week, Together and Free, a local organization, launched a detainee hotline in collaboration with other service providers. The hotline helps families locate detainees, consult with the most relevant organization, and connect with attorneys for legal information—if not full representation.

"That's probably the only good thing to come out of this chaos is a coordination of resources and communication," Maynard told Sahan Journal. "It's definitely made all of us see the need to be coordinated not just regionally, but also nationally."

The Border Is Everywhere Now

The mass transfer of detainees from Minnesota to Texas is part of a broader strategy. By scattering people across the country—often to remote facilities far from legal resources—ICE makes it harder to mount a defense, harder to organize resistance, and harder to document abuses.

Garza called the work her organization is doing "palliative care"—a grim acknowledgment that they are treating symptoms of a system designed to inflict suffering.

For advocates in Texas, the surge of Minnesota detainees was a reminder that the immigration enforcement apparatus is no longer confined to border states. ICE can now arrest people anywhere and disappear them into a detention system that spans the country.

"Now, the border is everywhere," Garza said.