Fighting to Protect Immigrants: How the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law is fighting for refugees in court.

Deep Dive
Written By Anna Krasner

To halt the indiscriminate arrest and detention of legally admitted refugees by ICE and border patrol agents in Minnesota, the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law, as co-counsel alongside the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP) and Berger Montague, filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of these refugees and others on Friday, January 23. ​

They were joined in the case by the nonprofit Advocates for Human Rights, which has been filing habeas corpus petitions on behalf of detained refugee families.   According to Sarah Kahn, Senior Staff Attorney at the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law, in its court filings “the government argued that they can and should imprison every refugee who has been in the country for one year.”

There’s an especially evil Catch-22 to the government’s actions:  DHS policy is that all refugees who have been in the country for more than one year and have not yet been granted lawful permanent resident (LPR) status must be detained, yet refugees cannot obtain LPR status until the one-year mark after their arrival, and DHS itself has put a freeze on deciding on these applications. Since the process of obtaining LPR status can take an additional one and one-half years, people caught in this sweep could remain imprisoned for two years or more while awaiting approval.

Detained refugees were shipped to detention facilities in Texas, where they were relentlessly interrogated by officials looking to find any discrepancy between their responses and information they had submitted on their applications for LPR status—an excuse to deport them.  None of these people had a lawyer present, and many of them had had no sleep and little food and were panic-stricken about notifying their families of where they were. As refugees, many were often still profoundly traumatized by political persecution in their country of origin.  Children  who were among those detained reported being separated from their families and held in isolation. The few refugees who were released in Texas found themselves far from home with no money and no resources.

Every one of these refugees had gained legal status by completing a long, intensive vetting process, including interviews with the US State Department and in some cases a long wait in a refugee camp or a third-party country until permission was granted to enter the country.  As Sarah Kahn noted, “There is no ‘’more legal’ way to enter the country than the process these people followed.”

On January 28, 2026, just five days after the lawsuit was filed,  the Court issued a temporary restraining order granting temporary relief to all refugees in this class who had not been charged with any grounds for removal.   The court order stipulated that the refugees in DHS custody be released within five days and prohibited DHS from arresting or detaining any more lawfully admitted refugees. The judge also specified humane treatment on release:  no more dumping them on the street with no way home.

The temporary restraining order has resulted in the release of 100 refugees who had been detained by ICE. But the government continues to try to strip these people of their refugee status. They do this by calling them in to re-interview them, hoping that relentless, hours-long interrogation will produce a pretext for revoking their visa status.

This case has not been won yet. The temporary restraining order is only the first step in court proceedings. The Trump administration is  already appealing the judge’s decision to the conservative  8th Circuit. Demonstrating unequivocally that the executive branch does not have the power to flout established law will take many more months of litigation.

The Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law has been at the forefront of fighting for immigrants’ rights—and all of our civil rights–despite having only a small legal staff.  The Center won the original Flores Settlement Agreement in 1997, which stipulates standards of care for immigrant children in federal custody, and has since been the court-appointed monitor for safeguarding these children. As detention conditions at the border became increasingly overcrowded and unsanitary and the Trump administration refused to acknowledge that children at the border were “in custody,” the Center, along with co-counsel National Center for Youth Law and Children’s Rights, filed a lawsuit to enforce the Flores Agreement.  On August 16, 2025,  Judge Dolly Gee ruled in favor of the plaintiffs. (Trump also tried to end the Flores Settlement  Agreement in his first term.) The Department of Justice is also appealing this decision.

Along with co-counsel, the Center has also filed a lawsuit to prevent the Trump administration from revoking U Visas and other protections for victims of crime, with the first hearing taking place yesterday.  A central principle in this case is that the President does not have the power to overturn provisions of a law passed by Congress—a crucial constitutional issue. The first hearing in this case took place yesterday. The Center for Constitutional Law and Human Rights is a small but mighty non-profit, with just three litigators on staff, and is heavily reliant on donations to continue pursuing these cases.

 

SOURCES

Anna Krasner
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