Continued care and protecting testimonies

For Twin Cities non-profits that support immigrant communities, this is a moment of assessment and continued resolve. Recalling the height of Operation Metro Surge, when Minneapolis-based COPAL, or Communities Organizing Latine Power and Action, was receiving 400 to 500 calls per day, associate executive director Carolina Ortiz said, “Right now it’s more manageable, but we continue to get hundreds of calls from people that still need support.”

Ortiz described families that still can’t find a detained loved one, as well as persistent ripple effects of job loss, medical crises, and legal bills.

COPAL, located at 2712 E. Lake St., received $1.5 million in individual donations, and 100 percent was channeled back into the community. Rent support was paused in late spring, but COPAL recently reopened the program “now that we are all caught up.” They started with a wait list of 100 people.

That’s the theme among non-profits that support vulnerable communities: managing impact waves. Only now, there’s no national media attention.

Still a safe haven?
At the International Institute of Minnesota (IIMN), a St. Paul organization that provides resettlement support, English education, and job-skills training to local refugees from all over the world, executive director Jane Graupman said.

“One of the best things about doing this work is you feel proud of your country, that you’ve gotten people out of a place of suffering (and now) they’re safe, and there’s opportunities for them,” Graupman said.

Graupman described people wrestling with the rupture of the safe haven concept: “to have that completely shut down and have people arrested for no reason.”

Both leaders recalled several reason why their communities are still anxious: arrests with no cause, severe physical harms, and medical neglect during detainment – including denial of crucial medications despite having them on hand. The latter resulted in a near-lethal situation for one of Graupman’s clients.

“They’re under stress when they arrive here because they’ve been victims of persecution,” Graupman said. And now they’ve been abducted and accused of fraud. “They weren’t part of the fraud… They weren’t even here.”

Today, the immigration system is at a standstill.

“It’s just such a huge irony because they keep saying they want everyone to have their green cards, to have their citizenship,” Graupman said.

She described citizenship application as “nerve-wracking” to begin with, but now complicated by more difficult tests, higher fees, and 39 countries under an indefinite hold for visa and green card interviews.

Still IIMN counsels people to apply because it’s still “so important for their protection,” and there is hope that pending court decisions will soon free up the system. For now, “people are following the rules and applying, and then that’s going nowhere.”

While standard immigration processing remains stalled, Operation PARRIS (Post-Admission Refugee Reverification and Integrity Strengthening) appears to continue despite a temporary restraining order issued by U.S. District Judge John Tunheim in late January. Arrests of refugees with no cause have stopped, but refugees have been summoned for intensive PARRIS interviews throughout spring.

Graupman said about 30 IIMN clients reported to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. or USCIS,  to undergo “invasive” four-to-six-hour PARRIS interviews, similar to the screening undergone in refugee camps.

Graupman said the operation targets people who have already undergone DHS, medical, and biometric screenings.

Echoing the Judge Tunheim opinion, Graupman added, “It begs the question, why are they doing this?”

IIMN sends legal counsel with any refugees summoned for these interviews, which DHS has described as re-vetting for green card eligibility.

But afterward, they never hear back from USCIS. This is unusual for a green card interview, which Graupman said normally leads to green card receipt the same day or within a week.

New mental health challenges
The experience of the past winter, immigration system complications, and the financial ripple effects have added up to today’s defining challenge: a mental health crisis among immigrant communities and their allies.

Ortiz spoke about “the need for mental health support” within the immigrant community. She noted youth who had both parents deported, a father who needed heart surgery, a family who still can’t locate their son, and others dealing with job loss. All compounded by living in a place that does not feel safe.

“The other part we sometimes don’t talk about is the impact on staff,” Ortiz said, describing months of non-stop advocacy. “Many of us were at the front lines… your mind is like go, go, go.”

But adrenaline only takes them so far. “How do we make sure we’re taking care of each other internally?” Ortiz said. “Because if we’re not in a position to really own what we’re feeling… we can’t be there 100 percent for our community members.”

At IIMN, the staff who are new Americans themselves worked from home during heightened enforcement. Graupman said that those who felt able to do so, worked on-site “because we had people showing up at our door that just had their child abducted… so we needed to be here.”

Similar to Ortiz, Graupman said “our anger at what we saw happening fueled our work.” Today, no one is sure how to process it all. “We’re pretty good about taking care of each other here… some days we cry,” Graupman said. “And then we pick ourselves up and get going again.”

Preserving data, choosing ongoing response
In the midst of all continued strains, community members wrestle with whether to report experiences to the Minnesota Truth Council, which was established by Gov. Walz at the end of March to centralize the documentation of harms.

Currently, any person (including allies, observers, journalists) who experienced or witnessed due process violations, human rights violations, or any other harm during Operation Metro Surge or PARRIS may complete an online form at the Advocates for Human Rights website, which is implementing the information-gathering effort.

Presently, non-profit organizations and countless neighborhood groups maintain their own data pools. Ortiz and Graupman acknowledged that centralizing testimonies may be the best way to establish complete statistics regarding harms, given the lack of transparency at a federal level.

For now, COPAL is processing the data from their 500 calls per day, to discover what the statistics say about “what the community was going through and is going through right now,” and they’re working with Refugees International and Amnesty International to ensure data protection.

COPAL is in “active conversations” with the Truth Council, but equally weighs issues of privacy and trust for clients who are not comfortable sharing testimonies with a state initiative.

People who experienced arrest, detainment, or any other harm are “probably not making a huge distinction between federal government and state government,” Graupman said. She regards state-led data collection as “very important” but it’s “asking a lot of people right now.”

Meanwhile, Ortiz herself is more public about her own story “growing up undocumented, then being a DACA recipient, then being a resident” and, even with that “safe status,” experiencing direct intimidation.

The increased media attention this past winter was a double-edged sword, drawing donor support and also putting a target on Ortiz and other staff.

“I did have ICE agents follow me… come to my home, look through my windows, my mailbox,” Ortiz said. She has footage of agents questioning her neighbors and of agents’ cars following her.

Ortiz shares this to truth-tell, and also to highlight that, throughout her journey as an immigrant, she has never felt entirely safe.

“ICE has always been here,” Ortiz said, giving the example of raids that happened in Minnesota in 2003. “I think, if it didn’t affect you at that moment, you didn’t know about it.”  

But people had family members detained and mistreated back then, too. What happened this year “was a moment that is different, but it’s not new,” Ortiz said. 

Ultimately, wherever the stories and statistics are kept, both Ortiz and Graupman hope it leads to ongoing collective action.

Ortiz said she often hears exhausted community members say, “I really wish things were just back to normal.” But as the community heals, she hopes for something else. “I don’t think we should go back to normal… if anything, it’s an opportunity to rethink… how do we continue to really be courageous?”

Graupman described that courage manifesting in continued volunteering and calling legislators – both to report new harms and to insist on actual immigration reform. “Everybody stay with it,” she said.

She noted how well-informed the Twin Cities community is now, and how impressive their immigration acumen is now. “Having that knowledge and finding ways to respond is… what got us to this better place. We just have to keep at it," Graupman said.